are curved tv's the biggest waste of money

I think the theory is that the human eye responds to the curve better than a flat screen, and it's more immersive.
It's the same sort of reason the Imax screens are curved.

Having said that, it does require you to sit in the right area in front of the screen to get the best affect.

As for waste of money, I guess it depends if you need a screen that big (IIRC they currently tend to be top of the range big screens), but the price is likely to drop if they do reasonably well in that sector of the market (at the moment the manufacturing method is still fairly new/low volume, but if it reaches a certain point it probably won't cost much more than a flat screen).

At the moment a fair number of PC gamers get a similar affect by using 3 monitors on triple monitor stand (or just a wide desk), to give them a very widescreen display that curves around their vision, and the likes of stock brokers and programmers do the same because they can take in the information from multiple screens with very little head movement.

I think they look great, I am not sure I'd buy one at the current price tag!

Indeed they are, closely followed by 4K and 3D.

4k will probably become mainstream in Computer displays, then hit the TV's as the manufacturers get the price down (which is basically what happened with HD flatscreens), as computer displays are typically higher quality, but smaller than the TV's so the companies can play around with the tech cheaper on the PC market* (the only major difference between a lot of TV's these days and the PC monitors is the input board and built in speakers).

4K can be done via satellite with the right codec.
There is at least one that can do it in about the same bitrate as the main HD codec, but requires a lot more processing power on the decoder unit as there aren't many dedicated chips yet** so it's usually done via software on either the main CPU or with some acceleration from the GPU.
It could also probably be done via disc, but it would be expensive (multi layer blu-ray discs), and can be done via a good BB connection to a PC (IIRC the codecs can do it at about 30-50mbs).

It wouldn't surprise me if we ended up with a new generation of receivers within about 10 years that moved us over to a better codec for all HD transmissions and allowed for some 4k content.


*For example computer displays often allow you to choose if you want best refresh rate, best colour reproduction, best viewing angle, best resolution for the size (or generally a combination of 2 or 3 of the above) depending on which tech is used in the panel.
The likes of the Nexus 7 2013 and Ipad retina displays are already at a pixel density that if used on a larger display could probably do 4k at 20-24 inches (and PC graphics cards are already at the point where they could probably cope with it for video playback fairly cheaply).

**Again expect it to hit PC's first, as with things like the codec used by blu-ray players the hardware was often built into cheapish videocards long before the blu-ray players become cheap (and many PC's before that could do it via CPU).