Time To Ditch Cable For Internet TV?

itwbennett writes "A flurry of announcements from YouTube, Boxee, Dell and Clicker on Thursday brought good news for anyone considering canceling their cable service in favor of internet TV. First, YouTube announced that within the next few days it will start offering full 1080P HD streams; better than your cable company can offer. Next, Boxee announced a 'Boxee Box' that promises to make it easier to get the content off your computer and onto your TV. Or you could hook up Dell's Inspiron Zino HD instead. 'This is an 8" x 8" PC running Windows 7 (with an option for Ubuntu) that you certainly could use as a desktop machine, but the form factor just screams 'Hook me up to your TV!' via its HDMI port,' says Peter Smith. And, last but not least in this roundup of announcements is the launch of Clicker, a programming guide for internet TV that aims to help you find what you want, when you want it."

Comments

Using cable to distribute video

[inKubus]

I don't have cable and I use a DSL modem. I have a cheap $30 gforce with an svideo out and what I did was get a RF Modulator at Home Depot and I feed the svideo (well, composite, after a quick convert) and audio into it. Then I connected it to my house cable (it was wired for cable already). Outside I disabled the feed from the cable company. Anyway, I connected my TV to my home cable and I just set it to channel 4 to view any content I want.

Netflix includes Instant Play which has a TON of movies, all included with your $8.95/month membership. Lots of TV show DVDs, especially. It's a great deal.

Re:Using cable to distribute video

[inKubus]

For HD you'd need an ATSC modulator. They are available but like $500+, not $22 ;)

Some other details, I set resolution to 800x600. NTSC has 525 scan lines, around 500 of which are visible. But it really looks good, full screen fills the screen perfectly centered. The gforce handles the downconvert to TV pretty perfectly (and I'm going svideo to composite also). TV's are pretty blurry anyway so it's not noticable. The splitters in the system in this case act as a multiplexer in reverse. I was lucky that they all went into a hub type splitter.

My next purchase will be an RF remote and maybe an RF wireless keyboard. It's not sharp enough for serious text but movies look great and netflix uses gigantic thumbnails so you can browse movies pretty well on the TV.

Netflix instant play is a hit, I'm also doing youtube playlists, Hulu is ok (I hate ads), music with visualizations might be fun at a party. I'd like to have a entertainment center PC but for under $100 I couldn't be happier. Anything to get me out of this chair and onto the couch ;)

Re:Using cable to distribute video

[WidgetGuy]

It's an even better deal if you get the $99 Roku box. Plug it in and it jumps right on your WiFi network. Also hooks up to your router or modem with an RJ45 cable. Connects directly to your TV via composite or HDMI. I've had mine with my $15/mo Netflix subscription for over a year now. Roku also carries MLB (Major League Baseball) and Amazon's Video on Demand (rip off prices, but they do carry more recent DVDs and TV programs than does Netflix's Watch Instantly offering).

The stuff from Netflix is free (no extra charge) with your standard, snail-mail subscription (as low as $9/mo). NO COMMERCIALS. You can even watch current-season TV programs (they are automatically added to your Netflix instant queue every week on the day after they air via cable TV). I watched CSI, Numb3rs and Dexter like that last year. And, what you put in your queue (by selecting them on-line at the Netflix site) STAYS in your queue until YOU delete it. Even the TV episodes. You select the Amazon and MLB stuff directly via the Roku box (you rent the Amazon stuff for a limited time, another reason to avoid them -- don't know about MLB since I've never used it). You can watch the Netflix content over and over again. Did I mention NO COMMERCIALS.

The Roku box is rock solid and its software is maintained and upgraded automatically over the 'net. Excellent customer service (although you probably won't ever need to use it 'cause the unit is so reliable and easy to set up). Simple remote control and a coverflow-like queue viewer (with descriptions of each DVD or TV episode). Top notch engineering and UI design all the way around. You will completely forget you are watching streaming video. It's really that good.

I changed my $100/mo cable TV/Internet subscription to just Internet over two years ago (RoadRunner was the only ISP offering 15Mbps down around here). I'm Pandora (also no commercials) and Netflix/Roku equipped now. Life is good.

Re:YouTube

[Shikaku]

http://www.southparkstudios.com/

http://www.thedailyshow.com/

http://www.hulu.com/

http://www.youtube.com/movies

http://www.getmiro.com/

I haven't paid for TV for over a year now. Neither did I torrent.

Re:I've canceled mine

[rotide]

I've done the same. However, I did actually build a HTPC with a dual QAM tuner for Boxee and OTA HD stations. Although, I did keep the $13 a month cable plan just so I don't have to fiddle with antennas. They pipe the OTA/QAM HD stations with this basic basic package.

I've rediscovered the simple pleasures of PBS, etc. I know I've had them all along, but the ability to just put reruns on was so great that I'd never actually watch PBS. Now I enjoy it again!

Why did I switch? Internet TV is so much easier. No, the quality, in general, isn't there yet, but it's so convenient to watch day old shows on Hulu and other sources. Come to find out, I was paying about $75 a month to pretty much watch NBC, CBS, etc. The only channels I miss now are Discovery and Disc Science. Other than that, screw it. Paying $75 a month for a bunch of channels I don't watch, no thanks.

The funniest part, the cableco was charging me $9+ for the DVR/Cable box and an ADDITIONAL $7 for the DVR _function_. $16/mo just for a metal box that sucks up electricity. Now I pay them $13 a month for the convenience of not needing an antenna.

Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex

[Seumas]

Last I heard, the average person watches an astonishing eight hours of television per day. Switching to entertainment on the internet to replace cable won't happen until data caps are lifted. Let's say people don't even have to watch HD content. Just regular digital/standard content. And let us say you have a family of four. Or are a few roommates sharing a place. That's an average of 32 hours of streaming video content per day or almost 700 hours of content per month. Not counting all the other bandwidth suckers you have going on like radio, gaming, etc.

Re:Deaf

[headhot]

Almost all of the dvd and blueray rips enclude subtitles now. VLC usually has it on by default.

Re:Playstation 3

[kramerd]

The sad thing is, linux is good because it handles most codecs and you can ignore drm with it (big win), but it always seems like getting 1080p and 7.1 surround out, and blue ray playing is iffy.

You were close./sarcasm

Windows is good because it handles most codecs and you can ignore drm with it (disturbingly easily, I might add), but it always seems like getting 1080p and 7.1 surround sound out and blu-ray playing are independent of an OS. These are hardware issues.

Re:YouTube

[melikamp]

30 seconds breaks were perfectly tolerable and kind of funny to read. But after a while they started actively fighting AdBlock, and there is no cure for that.

https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2456&start=45

AdBlock is a great technology, and it won't be long before we have trainable (Bayesian?) filters, I think. But Hulu has an upper hand in this fight: they can always default to gluing ads into the video stream, which would put us back to square one. But hey, whatever. I can write a script that detects new torrents and downloads them automagically. Eat that, Hulu.

Re:Is it live, or is it Memorex

[benow]

Who has the time to do a clean - professional-looking - edit of every episode of Law & Order?

comdel video.mpeg; mencoder -edl comdel.edl -o trim.mpeg video.mpeg does.