Still Not Enough

I remember when having a big TV meant something. Twenty-five inches felt like cinema. Thirty-six inches felt obscene. A projection screen was the fantasy of someone rich enough to waste money on it. Now everyone’s got a screen the size of a small car, and somehow it’s still not enough.

Titan—some British company I’d never heard of—just unveiled the Zeus, a 4K television measuring 380 inches across. House-high. Costs 1.2 million euros. You can run twenty channels simultaneously, which I guess is useful if you want to watch absolutely everything at once and understand nothing.

Only four of them exist. Two have already been sold to anonymous buyers, which says everything you need to know about who has money and what they want to do with it. There’s a test unit at Cannes that showed up during the World Cup, which might be the most absurd placement I’ve ever heard—film festival meets sporting event meets ’come see this enormous thing we made.’

I can picture it: some oligarch’s living room, or a sports bar so enormous it needs its own zip code. The point isn’t really to watch anymore. The point is to have. To say you have something no one else has, something so gratuitous and oversized it becomes almost like sculpture. It’s the end of a very particular kind of wanting—the kind that gets duller every time you feed it.

There’s something funny about it, though. We’ve spent decades shrinking our screens—phones in our pockets, tablets on the couch—and here’s Titan saying the answer was always to go the opposite direction. Get one the size of a building. Watch the World Cup like it’s a public event happening in your living room. Maybe they’re right. Or maybe it’s just the last gasp of a guy who has everything else and needs one more impossible thing.