Watching the box with only one control is still a remote dream

FOR THE past couple of weeks I’ve been in possession of a 55in TV. How big is a 55in TV? Enough that your sitting room becomes a TV with a small living space attached.

In 55in the Countdownconundrum gains an extra four letters. When they show those wide shots of the Dáil, you find yourself somewhat amazed to find Mick Wallace sitting beside you on the sofa. And when Nancy Dell'Olio appears on The Late Late Show? Well, let's just say that image is burned on the retinas for three days after.

Of course, you get used to it. The first time you walk in on a TV that size, your brain sends a protest letter to your eyes. But after a couple of days? It's like you've always watched Nine Newson jumbotron, David McCullagh's disapproving eyes bigger than dinner plates, Jean Byrne's leather toga stretching from floor to ceiling.

We had to hand the set back to its owner, Samsung, on Thursday, and return to its stumpy predecessor. The point of the giant TV, though, wasn’t its size but all the stuff it does. Like a few other high-end TVs on the market, it does a lot. It has 3D capabilities, the technicalities of which I only fully realised when the man installing it said: “Here are the glasses. And this box is where you recharge them.” It has a camera for Skype, apps to link your phone and tablet, streaming from the web, and a built-in movie store.

It had, in fact, too much. The 3D makes footballers look like sophisticated marionettes. Trying to do anything requires a complex sequence of key-punching. It adds several remote controls to the half-dozen already teetering on the sofa arm. After sitting in front of the behemoth for a few nights, I found myself asking big questions about what exactly TV is for any more.

We know that the marriage of internet and TV is the next big thing, but what’s surprising is how long it’s been the Next Big Thing. We’re still using television pretty much as we always did. Over the past two decades we’ve become trapped in an ever-increasing circle of costs: licence fee, cable services, satellite channels, set-top boxes, HD, Sky+, pay per view.

One-size-fits-all channels means paying for a heap of channels you never watch. Package is lumped on to package, like the stray remote controls picked up along the way. DVD player on top of XBox on top of set-top box on top of the video recorder you still have, just in case. Yet little has really changed. The TV is still just a box in the corner, pumping out programmes in a way not so different from how it always has. But the quest for a TV of everything goes on.

In the US, internet TV has begun to gain a little ground. In the UK and Ireland, where the options have been more limited, we still watch a very small percentage of our TV through the web, even if so much of general screen time now is given over to watching something other than television.

Yet the computer is now more often an atomised experience, shared but rarely at the same time in the same place. Computer commercials might portray families laughing on a sofa while someone holds the laptop, but the experience isn’t so communal in reality. (“Tilt the screen a bit. No, face it towards me. Ah screw it, just mail it to me and I’ll watch it later.”) So everyone – Google, Apple, every TV maker, Netflix, even Tesco – is pushing their vision of the future. And somewhere along the way it should cohere and deliver everything – movies, music, cat videos, TV – into one set. Maybe you’ll even be able to buy one channel at a time rather than having Movies4Men, Argos TV and your pick of Nigerian soaps when you only wanted Discovery Shed in the first place.

And maybe, just maybe, it will be done out of one remote control – be it your phone, tablet, whatever. In fact, Xbox’s Kinect is offering a free update that allows voice control for your TV. So you can finally sit in the comfort of your own sitting room and shout your demands at the set. The most popular of which will probably remain, “Which is the right bloody remote control for this thing?”