My own television journey is rather minimal, yet unlike most here it's probably at its peak now (at least in terms of ownership).
Growing up, my parents had one (hand-me-down wood-panel 70s-era) CRT 19" TV. We had superbasic cable (just local channels) until I was 9, then a normal antenna after a move.
When I got a Nintendo 64 in fourth grade, they did not want that shit in their living room, so they stuck the old TV in the basement for me to use, and then bought a new CRT 27" TV for the living room. My dad and I did a pretty involved project to split the antenna line coming from the attic so that it would go both to the "main" TV and to mine in the basement. As the TV was basically a video games display for me, I almost never actually used said antenna line, but it was fun to set up. After the ATSC transition, we only set up a box on the living room TV.
Then things got silly. My grandpa gave my mom his "old" 34" CRT HDTV (bought around the same time as their 27" CRT, but way fancier/more expensive/bigger/heavier). My grandpa thinks everything he buys is valuable forever, so they couldn't just dump it. That TV took over main living room duty (and was watched maybe an hour or two a week at this point), the 27" TV was moved up into my parents' room, and was plugged in and used by my mom to watch Desperate Housewives for an hour one time during its multiyear tenure of sitting there taking up space. "My" TV remained in the basement, but I had left for college at this point, so it was basically not used except maybe one every few months by my sister to watch a DVD or something. Three TVs in that house at that point, definitely two more than needed.
At school, I never had a physical TV, but at this point had actually gotten into a few TV shows that I watched on my 22" (big at the time) LCD monitor. I'd obtain them from either recording them OTA using my ATSC tuner PCI card and antenna, or from less than legal means that college students are notorious for.
After that, GF and I lived with roommates for about three years. For the first year, we had no TV in our house but would watch Netflix on computer monitors. In the second year, the four of us pooled together our resources and splurged on a $0.99 Goodwill CRT TV which was excellent for Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros., and Netflix.
Now, GF and I live alone, and for the first ~1.5 years we would just occasionally watch stuff on her fancy 4K monitor (she's a pro photographer).
But this January we finally bought a real TV. A fancypants 43" 1080p Sharp with built-in Roku (we paid $229 - TVs have gotten silly cheap). We're still on GF's sister's boyfriend's Netflix account, our Amazon Prime account, plus we have an antenna (for a whopping one show a year) and an occasional rotation of fancy service that we'll subscribe to for a month or two and then cancel until we want it again (mostly HBO Now during Game of Thrones season). We'll watch something on it usually about once or twice a week on average. Also Mario Kart.
I've never had real cable service (and only even had fake cable service with a cable box in our closet for 12 months since it was cheaper than internet-only), and even the one show we watch OTA bugs me since it has commercials. I'm just a dirty millennial that's grown up on pirated shows and ad-free paid streaming so shitty service or advertisements are just not options I'm willing to pay for.
