[ilikepi]

Exactly. There are probably two groups of people in this thread who are interested in the pitch:

* people who want a completely dumb display with a bunch of inputs, as you say

* people who want a display with some smarts but that is "open", can be "hacked", etc

I totally understand the desire to have more things to hack, but there are already numerous little boxes, pucks, sticks, etc to scratch that itch. What's really missing is a way to get a display that doesn't have any of that at all and also doesn't cost 5x because it's made for commercial entities. (Incidentally, my early research suggests a lot of commercial displays actually have "smart" BS in them already, it's just more targeted at device management than serving content-based ads, so that inflates the cost if I'm not going to use it.)

EDIT: formatting

[pupdogg]

To be clear, I am ALL for this group below:

* people who want a completely dumb display with a bunch of inputs

This leaves the option to hack it with whatever input device the user sees fit.

[gonehome]

I like the idea of one cable to an external box of many inputs that lives in the tv stand.

It separates out the input box from the display (makes it easier to plug things into) and allows just one cable to come from the TV. You can also have a lot more ports this way (8 HDMI?)

Samsung has a TV that implements something like this (of course it has all the rest of the smart crap too that you could nix).

Also this makes it easy to potentially have upgradeable/future input boxes with new ports without having to modify the display.

It's still 'dumb', but I think breaking out the inputs is a better design.