Three tellies, three rooms, and the mistake of buying the same box for all of them

We have three tellies in this house and for about a year I tried to run all of them the same way. Same box, same setup, same everything, on the theory that consistency would make life simpler. It made life harder, and it took me embarrassingly long to work out why. The rooms are not the same, so the kit should not be either. The front room telly is on for hours, gets used by everyone including my mother-in-law, and needs to work without anyone thinking about it. That one wants the most capable box in the house and a remote with as few buttons as possible. The bedroom one goes on for forty minutes before sleep. Nobody is scrutinising the picture at half eleven at night. A cheap stick is completely fine there, and putting an expensive box in that room was money doing nothing. The kitchen is a small screen that mostly plays news while I cook, and half the time I am not even looking at it. Honestly it barely needs to be a video device at all. Realising that changed how I bought things. Instead of one decision repeated three times, it was three different and much cheaper decisions. I worked through which streaming devices are worth it in the UK to figure out where the extra money genuinely buys you something, and the honest answer was: in exactly one room out of three. The other thing worth knowing is that these boxes are just small computers, and the set-top box background explains why the cheap ones age so badly compared to the good ones. Total spend this way came in under what I had budgeted for a single top-end setup, and the front room is better than it has ever been. Stop buying for the house. Buy for the room.