Sleeping, but with extra steps

I wish I had a photo of the couch.

In highschool, I opted to sleep on a loveseat couch that my parents graciously donated to my disaster of a bedroom. The couch was forest green with paisley patterns in yellow, but was that the underlying foam sticking out, or was it the pattern? who knew and who cared. It was my couch!

At the time, my bedroom setup was amazing - it was my bachelor pad. I had dual 26" CRT monitors for my computer (a pentium IV iirc) and a big ol 20-something inch flat screen CRT TV, and I slept on that couch every night, with most of those screens burning my retnas, destroying my sleep hygene, and forming a habit that I’m certainly not alone with. I, to this day, fall asleep to the TV, even though I’ve graduated to sleeping in a bed.

My choice of show is specific - it has to be something I’ve seen many times, so I’m not invested in the storyline, it has to be a lighthearted comedy, preferrably without a laugh track. Again, I’m not alone here in selecting Futurama as my sleep-aid of choice - shout out to /r/futuramasleepers

I can’t remember which dvd it was, but one of the Futurama dvd menus had this bright red block in the middle of the screen, and that was burned into that CRT tv so bad you couldn’t really see anything happening in the middle of the tv otherwise.

The burn-in was preventable of course, I know you’re thinking - sleep timers! I’m sure that this was the manufacturers solution to the issue, slap a timer on this badboy and you’ll never burn in the screen.

Now technology for TVs has grown out of this burn-in issue, modern TVs don’t succumb to this so easily, and they’ve engineered their way out of that problem! Great success. But we as a society have gotten used to the sleep timers, they’re nice for our melatonin production and sleep quality not to have a spotlight shining on you while you sleep at night.

But why stop at just a simple timer, I say? let’s add PROGRESSIVE DEHANCEMENT to the experience - as an expert on the topic of sleeping to tvs, I think it would be much better for the user if the TV shut off in stages.

You might use something like what I’m talking about on your laptop or phone already you might have the lights warm after a certain time, or the screen dim, or like me you might enjoy your phone going to black & white at a certain hour of day to remind you not to use it.

Your TV should have all this behaviour and more, with the bonus that the end state is that it should be off.

Imagine a routine, where you set your sleep timer, and the tv gradually warms the colours, then dims all the way to zero (doesn’t have to be a linear dim, could have stages, plateaus or even sinusoidal behaviour!), then it’s just audio, and continues like that for a little while, and the audio goes to zero too, eventually fully off.

Wouldn’t that be a neat feature? No idea if it would work or help me sleep, but it beats the heck outta the blunt “10 min” “30 min” “90 min” options I’ve got on my TV now.