FordPrefect

If you think that's rough, try watching CBS Sunday Morning.
I swear to god, that free show that airs on broadcast TV, must be one of the hardest currently running shows to stream.

Well, that & "Shaka Ilembe"

Edit: I say Sunday Morning is hard to stream, because the CBS streaming app repeatedly fails to load the right segment after a commercial break, starting the show over at the beginning; if you skip forward from there, it shows another commercial break after you try to seek. Our last viewing of this 90-minute show, took 3.5 hours.

Migleemo a' Trois, in 3... 2... 1...

Huh... I just assumed the Andy Dick hologram was so much more pushy that it got the other one deprecated out of pettiness.

Hodor?

Dark Matter

ChromeCast was far too finicky & app-dependent for my liking; also didn't seem to add any platform-specific content I cared about.

Samsung was awful. Didn't work with anything except Samsung & then still very app-specific.

Raspberry Pi is a great way to put a proper desktop browser, & standard devices like a HDD/NAS, KB/mouse, touchscreen control, on a TV; but it doesn't receive casts from one's phone out of the box, nor offer any exclusive streaming content. That said, a Pi running Kodi can be a pretty great media center PC, for content you already have.

Roku often has free streaming content that I & my family actually like to watch.

I also find it to be a much less tightly gated app ecosystem, than ChromeCast etc. There are Roku apps (annoyingly called "channels") that allow me to cast whatever files I've got on mobile, or whatever media streams I browse to; no restrictive "this app doesn't cast that" limitations. I have seen similarly general-purpose casting apps for ChromeCast etc, but the only ones I've seen used were a lot more limited than what I run on Roku. Several seemed to have had their functionality actively disrupted by system updates from Google. Never had any such issue on Roku; in fact, my venerable RokuHD unit plays more codecs than it used it, & had an actual bugfix just last year, despite Roku announcing EOL in 2019. The RokuExpress is a bit of a dog (about as slow as the RokuHD), but it works for non 4K content. The RokuUltra has worked flawlessly so far.

I don't know of any smart TVs from major OEMs, that support streaming direct from Samba shares / NAS, right out of the box; but there are apps ("channels") for that.

Roku remotes have no numbers on them; if you get a RokuTV (a TV with Roku built-in), it will not ever accept numbers input, even from another remote. For this reason, I recommend getting a TV with proper tuner & number keys, if there's any chance the TV will get used for actual OATV broadcasts. ("Free, over the airwaves, as God intended." - David Letterman)

ATSC 3.0 is getting encrypted, though (violates the terms of the broadcast license, but the FCC isn't stopping it). So, useful OATV without internet, may disappear soon anyway. Also worth noting: changing channels betwen encrypted ATSC 3.0 OATV streams, is sloooow. Like really slow; don't push the button too quickly or the TV tuner might crash, slow.

None of the streaming devices like ChromeCast/Roku/etc, have the full breadth of DigitalVideoRecorder capability. If you actually want a great OATV DVR experience, consider getting an external ATSC 3.0 tuner with "NextGen TV" certification logo. You might even want a dual/multi tuner unit: Even though many TVs & streamboxes & tuners, have multiple inputs, none of them support Picture-In-Picture except the dual tuner units. More than I can say for the TVs themselves: HiSense replaced a 40" with a 44" because the power-switch daughterboard died, & they sent a replacement part but then realized they had no techs in the area to install it. (They didn't have the 40" anymore, poor me.) Element has repeatedly made their tuner app worse & worse, to the point where it doesn't even go to what channel you're on when you pull up the guide, dumps out of the guide at seemingly random intervals, & sometimes switches to the wrong channel & then freezes up. Bear in mind, the TV manufacturer makes the OATV tuner app, for each of these TVs, not Google/Roku/etc. Which makes the insanely bad layout of the Samsung TV & casting apps, even more inexcusable: they had control of both ends, & seem to have put minimal effort into anything but restricting features that were "universal" over 10 years ago.

I like Roku, but their remote is stupid, for those few people who still watch OATV.

I think the best of both worlds is to get a TV with a good built-in tuner \ tuner-app, then hook a standalone Roku unit to it. All the Roku features & you get to keep the number keys & CC button.

Just make sure it isn't running Android 4.4

Most "smart" TVs (which can & do fetch currently-airing show data from each channel's metadata streams, when tuned to that channel) rely on internet connectivity to show the channel guide, so implicitly, that they act slow & buggy when used without internet.

Some "smart" TV's tuner apps, seem to get buggier & less convenient after updates, as if the manufacturer decided to gimp the tuner, in an effort to force more streaming usage.

So real; I have just years of old '90s SciFi etched into my brain. SciFi novels, too, but it might be nice if some percentage were nonfiction? I dunno, honestly at this point I'm just glad when I see media with a plot that I don't immediately foresee the denouement of.

Weirdly, I watch less TV now than when I had more monthly bills to work off.

I was even doing pretty well about steering clear of social-marketing sites, until SMBC-comics added a comments section directly below the first of four stops on my (semi-)daily funny pages.

What shit did I start? I agree 100% with the sentiment of this post's OP: Teachers moving to corporate marketing jobs just to get a survivable wage, is a tragedy of first order. The people who do our societies most vital work are not rewarded anywhere near commensurate with the importance of their work; hence my reading of this post.

I was joking about needing 18650 cells as a point of reference for pricing... mostly. I really don't have any sense of the prices of those other commodities you mentioned. Regardless, based on what you said, it seems like Australian teachers are better off than here, but still grossly undervalued?

And no, I hated the musical episode of Strange New Worlds because it wasn't up to my expectations based on their invoking of Buffy The Musical, but I loved most of Discovery & Stamets is freaking gold. I didn't really think they could top the engineering hijinks until Tig Notaro as Jet Reno was introduced. She's a treasure.

I have had good luck finding what should be basic essential goods from overseas brands, when the major US brands stop making them. I was unironically, seriously, asking if you or anyone here could suggest a brand of jeans that still comes in loose fit black, as that's literally all I can wear to work & need them for life as well. Sorry to derail the topic; I was leery of that, but Australia has good stuff sometimes so I figured I'd risk it!

It did lead to one, but he didn't last forever, & again, I think it's pretty hard to argue they were better off before than after.