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Ask Slashdot: Are You Streaming-Only For Home Entertainment?
hinesbrad writes "I'm getting really tired of paying ridiculous fees to my cable company just to have a DVR and high speed internet access. A neighbor of mine bought a cheapo Dell computer with an HDMI output. Apparently he streams all of his news live from respective websites, and also watches many of the shows on NBC and Comedy central using this method. He's effectively turned his PC into a DVR and gotten rid of his cable subscription fee. I wonder, how many people have completely gotten rid of their cable/satellite subscription and have now instead moved to a Hulu/Netflix/Content producer website streaming solution instead?" If you've done this, what does your approach include? If you'd like to, what are the bottlenecks?
It's cheaper to just pay for cable internet, and then subscribe to Netflix or Hulu. I like how many channels offer online streaming for their shows, but producer websites seem to be slower and more congested -- generally not worth
I'm Canadian, so the Hulu/Netflix/etc thing doesn't quite work out so well.
I did ditch the cable a while ago though.
News has gotten progressively more useless, to the point where it actually annoys me to watch it, and I'm not a big fan of sports... which is where cable seems to win. The occasional time I want to see a game, I'll go to a friends house (which is usually more fun anyway).
I just buy the DVD box sets of shows I like .. and download if they haven't been released yet (I know this is technically stealing .. but I can live with it). I prefer watching stuff this way anyhow.
I can't even remember the last time I heard about something being on TV and thought "damn, if only I had cable".
I will never pay for cable or dish or watch broadcast tv again. Roku streams Netflix, Hulu, even Aljazeera and Democracy Now to my TV. Device only cost $60. You don't need a DVR when you're watching on demand. I also watch tv and movies on my laptop, which enables me to sit outside and drink and smoke. Roku has tons of channels and you can even create your own.
When you can watch what you want on demand on the web?
If you don't watch sports you're fine. If you do then unfortunately ditching cable just isn't a good option yet.
Already do. Cable television is a joke. They endlessly shove commercials down your throat after you already pay 100+/month for any reasonable selection of channels. I can buy Netflix for $7/month (with no commercials) and then I can couple that with Hulu (sure a two minute long commercial in the very beginning but that's it) which is free. I get everything I want and more without the useless 50 channel basic package. Fortunately ESPN finally hopped on the streaming train as well and now I get sport's programming on top of that. And if you don't happen to get sports because of a local blackout in your area, good ol' bunny ears now provide 1080 straight to my television provided I can get a signal.
Cable is done. Any cable company that actually wants to make money should be working hard to get their content providers to allow them to stream because the first one to do that (and do it well) will win the market.
I don't see why anyone needs cable. It's just entertainment. There are plenty of alternatives for entertainment including streaming Netlfix or playing video games. If you get an over the air TV signal you're sacrificing even less.
I use a MythTV box, no cable subscription, but netflix and hulu. But since Netflix streaming uses Silverlight and isn't supported on Linux, I get snail-mail DVDs from netflix, which I don't mind so much.
IT's also a spiffy media server. My entire DVD and CD collection is burned to it and available for playback anywhere in the house.
So in spite of a few drawbacks, it isn't overall a bad solution.
I've been relying on solely the internet for my entertainment for five years now. It started with bit torrent and legal grey area streaming sites like tv-links that have since been shut down; but the legitimate options have gotten really good over time. Hulu is excellent as is netflix streamingl and between those two I hardly ever feel the urge to go to bit torrent. You can get most of what is good on hulu for free, but with their inexpensive subscription you get a lot more stuff, and even a movie selection that sometimes rivals netflix. I keep up with current shows like The Daily Show, House, Fringe, and Sons of Anarchy using only hulu, and I don't really have time for anything else or I'd rather play a videogame. The best part is that I am always watching something I choose, never flipping through all the channels wishing there was something good on. The best part is that it can only get better from here as hulu and netflix add more content and it is already good.
Between Netflix, Hulu (free), and Redbox all of our household entertainment needs are taken care of. With the savings we can pick up a season or two (or more if we buy used) of our favorite shows.
Recently picked up an HD Homerunner box and things are great! Awesome to watch shows on *your* schedule
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
Unfortunately, the party is going to end sooner rather than later. ISPs and data carriers are seeking to place monthly caps on net use, aimed squarely at streaming, and will charge extra fees for those going over the arbitrarily set limits.
Ditched cable and never looked back. Not much of a need for live news, but get them from the web sites.
Use netflix streamed to a PC or my PS3 for movies and older tv shows.
Hulu for newer stuff
Torrents fill in the gaps for whatever is not available through above methods.
Comcast's 250GB cap limits you to 4 hours of HD streaming a day for a 30 day month. Assuming you do NOTHING else with your internet
And Hulu Plus, but I don't use that much anymore. Netflix has everything I watch.
I've never personally had cable and pretty much am a hulu/netflix/web kinda media junkie.
I dropped cable TV more than four years ago, and haven't looked back since. With Netflix and other online sources, I can watch all the movies and TV shows I want, mostly without commercial interruption.
One thing you didn't mention was that you can use a PC as an actual DVR (as in a recorder) by hooking up a tuner for those pesky shows no one seems to want to allow to stream. If you're in a decent service area you'll get all the networks in full hd for free, and be able to record them (and skip ads) for no subscription fee. With a tuner and streaming access you'll only be limited by shows that are both not available to stream and not broadcast over the air.
I'm almost there, however live sports is a hard thing to find an alternative channel for.
I use Boxee on a HTPC (you could also just get a Boxee Box), coupled with a digital antenna and a Netflix account. I don't miss out on anything that I wouldn't want to. About the only thing you'd really have to worry about are sporting events... assuming you'd even care about lame stuff like sports. :P
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
I love my Roku. It has replaced cable tv and even most bit torrent in my house
-- Sig under construction...
I'm now cable-free, which has its advantages and disadvantages. Whether it's right for you comes down to one question: What do you want to watch?
For most broadcast networks, streaming is great. I use Boxee on my Mac, which aggregates a lot of shows from a lot of sources, just not Hulu. Combine that with the Hulu desktop app, and voila. Most of the shows I watch.
But not all. HBO, for instance, is (last time I checked) still aggressively married to the subscription-cable model. You can get their content on their website, if you are an HBO subscriber through the traditional means. I would have no problem paying for HBO, but I don't know of any cable provider that offers JUST HBO. So I have to pay for a package of nonsense like the Food Network and whatever's become of the History Channel. I want to give HBO my money, but they don't want to take it. Showtime is the same way.
I don't know what FX's current attitude towards streaming is, but I'll look into it before Rescue Me starts back up again.
stripShow - Where WordPress meets webcomics
I live in Sweden and pay the $250 TV tax / licence. The only "TV Program" we watched in the past year is Solsiden (if you live here you will know why...) We get free cable TV (about 15 channels) in the appartment, but hardly ever watch it. We use the BBC iPlayer for almost all the "TV" we watch, using an old PC connected to the LCD TV. Expat Shield gives us a reliable UK IP address and is free (add supported), (Foxy Proxy can also work if you get a good proxy.)
We aren't streaming-only, but we're streaming plus iTunes plus disc, and we've been doing less and less disc, to the point where I've fairly frequently sent discs back unwatched simply because I decided I wasn't that interested, and there was something better on iTunes or NetFlix. We might be an exceptional case though--we haven't had cable for about ten years, because it was too tempting to channel surf. With on-demand streaming and iTunes, you watch when you decide to watch, rather than being at the mercy of the schedule, which is a *huge* win. Plus, no commercials.
I use mini dv to rca adapter to use 46 inch tv as display for fiance's imac. text obviously looks like crap but video (hulu and amazon, youtube and vimeo, boxee, etc.) is fine. i also use rivet to share locally stored media from the imac to my xbox, windows media center to share it from my win7 laptop. i also use the xbox for netflix and once in a while hit up zune. supplement it all with a dv tuner and a physical netflix dvd once in a while and we're quite happy. three years sans cable
"You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere."
I have a Roku XDS. It is really nice for movies from Netflix and (Prime member) Amazon which are all covered by buying the box and paying a really cheap $9.99 a month to Netflix.
I am planning on dropping the movie channels from cable, but will keep the "basic" (non-premium) cable connection as well as (of course) the Internet connection. You need 3-5Mb/sec bandwidth pretty continuously in order to get any streaming to work.
Roku does not offer much in the way of playing movies from a local source, however. There is a "channel" called PlayOn which lets you connect up a PC as a web server to the Roku box and some people have this working pretty well, others have had plenty of problems with it - mostly, I believe due to networking configurations.
Now for the bad news. This isn't going to last very long. The current cable infrastructure in the US simply cannot provide 3-5Mb/sec dedicated bandwidth to every home. It wasn't designed to do that and no matter how many promises the cable companies make about 20Mb/sec connections, this is bursting only. The bottleneck isn't the cable to the home, it is the fiber to the neighborhood node where it is converted from from a fiber link to coax. Once the neighborhood node gets saturated, the performance of any streaming service will suffer significantly.
One possible solution is for the local "streaming box" to simply buffer lots and lots of content using whatever bandwidth it can get. Then you can watch from the local buffer, whether it is disk or flash based is immaterial. Roku has only a small RAM buffer today but future devices could include a hard drive. Certainly no Blu-Ray player or TV solution is going to be as flexible. Boxee from what I have heard is having a terrible time getting their act together but once they do this might be the better way to go.
For now, I have a $99 Roku box and it is working. Maybe in a year or two I will need to replace it with something with more buffer space. For $99 I figured it was worth it for a couple of years of service.
Netflix, Vudu, Hulu == C-Ya comcast : )
I pulled the plug on Comcast over six months ago, and I love it. I bought a Dell Inspiron Zino HD 410 and hooked it up to my big ol' TV. It has HDMI out which actually sends the audio as well, since this computer is designed to be TV connected. It does a great job for streaming Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon VOD. I'm saving $60/mo., and enjoy a better experience. On demand streaming is wonderful, since there's so much out there to watch already. I do have to be patient, waiting for TV shows to hit Hulu or movies to hit Netflix, but it's been worth it to me. The only thing I really miss is the ability to just sit down and let the flashing box entertain me. Now I do have to make a choice. Before, I could sit down and let a Mythbusters marathon entertain me. I can still do that, but I have to think to do it before I can do it. I've also been spending more and more of my time watching podcasts from TWiT and others. I watch very little actual TV these days, only those shows I really want to see.
My Company - Red Cedar Technology
100% streaming with netflix/hulu on ps3 and iPhones. Works great. Not all shows are available, but I honestly don't need to watch that much tv. Waiting 1 extra day to see house or other shows is not too much of an inconvience, but might be for some hardcore tv people. Possible limitation, uverse is changing our plan to 250gigs. This might be a problem.
If you have kids, this is an awesome solution. Kids watch everything on netflix, no commercials so they don't ask for new toys! They are never about the lastest fads etc. Commercials on hulu are not always age appropriate. Also we use boxee on the computers as well, nice old cartoon programming such as smurfs.
Again, this may not be for everyone, but with upping our connection to 12mbps we save over 100/month
When our TiVo died we were a bit short on cash (think: October, 2009). So we tried streaming and ... it was pretty decent. Then we looked at our $96/month DirecTv bill and thought, "Hmm.....," and canceled that sucker.
Since then 1) we've saved over $1,500, 2) we've totally fallen in love with Neflix Watch Instantly, 3) Hulu is good for the few shows we used to watch regualrly, and 4) we generally watch less TV than we used to (a Good Thing ®). It hasn't bothered us in the slightest. We have two other families who have decided that if a couple of old fogies like us (we're 61 and 65) can do this, so can they.
Cheapo and Dell..... Isn't that some kind of oxymoron?
Sometimes it's just nice to have instant access to channel flipping, sports, and news. I still use Hulu to watch shows that I miss, or sometimes download them. But I can't watch a college football game live without cable unless I want to watch a low-quality stream on the computer. And as much as news channels tend to spout crap on a regular basis, I just like watching CNN while I'm eating breakfast or if a major event is happening. For $40/mo I get 50+ HD channels, so I'll hang on to cable a bit longer.
I stream lots of content off the Net. Beyond that, I have Windows 7 on a desktop with an HDTV tuner card and over the air antenna and record lots of content with it. I then watch the recorded content on my HDTV by way of the Windows Media Center extension capabilities of the XBox360. (Aside: Spare me fanboy stuff) If you have an iDevice, check out RemotePotato. You can control what Windows Media Center records and stream videos to your iDevice when you're afar from home. With Netflix (streaming + discs), Hulu+ and recording shows over the air, it's difficult to keep up with all the content choices afforded to me. You might consider also using PlayOn which allows you to view Hulu content on your HDTV by way of the gaming consoles which can act as DLNA clients.
I use Boxee, Miro, and a used 720P projector connected to a used mac mini and a drobo full of spare hard drives. It gives me dolby surround to the surround sound Logitech speakers I bought from a coworker. So I've got effectively an entire wall of video for not much cash. 300 dollars for the Sanyo projector, 200 dollars for the surround sound, 300 dollars for the drobo, 200 dollars for the drives and 500 dollars for the Mac Mini.so for about 1500 dollars I have a home theater system that also allows me to view/store/share everything digitally with a RAID system that is upgradeable to 8 TB. The real bottleneck is sharing content over my DSL connection. I can't view things on the Boxee app Livestation for example while simultaneously downloading content using Miro without either 1 of the downloads being slow or the Boxee video stream buffering a lot.
The reason I would recommend this setup is that each piece is relatively disposable, I can lose a drive, the projector bulb can burn out, or the Mac Mini can fail, and I am not out a lot of money. It's just a series of pretty inexpensive components but it still does 720P with dolby digital surround as well as shares all the content I have. One can do this exact thing on Windows Linux or OS X with the hardware listed. And you can control it all with just the tiny mac remote and the projector remote. Works well with bluetooh keyboard, bluetooth mouse and bluetooth headphones as well.
At home, i have a 4core pc microatx in a tiny case running windows 7 on a 42 1080p w/hdmi out. I also got a Media Center Remote from Newegg and setup IntellaRemote for everything i needed. In the bedroom i use Apple TV 2 (I never use it for apple services though) .
So I use a variety of avenues for software. I also had this SAME setup in Canada too. I just signed up for a VPN service and was able to VPN into the US.
For movies:
-Netflix
-Boxee (running as software)
-BluRay Drive
-MediaCenter player with CoreAVC codec to use my graphics card for decoding.
-Old fashion giganews!
-I stream via Airplay to the bedroom on the apple tv2 with AirVideo
For TV:
-Hulu
-Direct sites (ie 48hour mystery, Dateline)
-Netflix
-Slingbox (I hooked up to a family cable box halfway across the US, hey If they are going to pay for cable why not benefit from it!!).
-Antenna!!! GET a dollar store antenna and you will more than likely get NBC,ABC,CBS in HD for free over the air.
Hope it helps!
I ditched cable last December. I bought an aerial antenna, but after a few weeks I stopped using it altogether. This is how my living room experience is structured:
- I mostly listen to music. I have a 1st Generation AppleTV (160 GB), and all my music is in there.
- I have a Roku box, where I stream Netflix, and Vimeo. Vimeo is *amazing* for quality artistic videos ("HD" and "StaffPicks" channels), most people don't know that.
- I also have a Blu-Ray player to receive Netflix discs.
I don't watch live TV anymore. I get my news online, reading them. No reason for news in a video format. And for Hollywood show entertainment, there's Netflix (streaming+discs). I can wait without a problem for a few months until Netflix gets TV shows seasons. And for my artistic indie videos, there's Vimeo. I need nothing more.
- When I'm out of the home, I use RDIO on my Android phone, an unlimited streaming service like Spotify, but for the US. Either I use 3G/Wifi to stream, or just "sync offline" the music I want to listen to when there's no internet connection.
I need no stinking live TV. I cherry-pick what I watch.
I cut the cord about a month ago and got a Roku. Netflix, HuluPlus, and Amazon Prime, plus the channels on Roku have more than met my needs. As for my wants, HuluPlus is near worthless since the shows I'd use it for aren't available for streaming to the TV despite being able to watch them online (eg Fringe) and Amazon Prime is utterly worthless unless you like Dr Who. Netflix is a champ though with them getting streaming for current shows still on the air. Once the networks/studios knock of being stupid and start looking at streaming like pay channels I think we'll see the streaming services start to look more like HBO than not.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
Netflix, Hulu (free, will never pay to watch ads) and clicker (when i'm looking for something) for the past 4 or so years here. I just have a laptop hooked to a TV (almost never gets unplugged) with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Netflix kept me entertained for over a year just by itself before hulu, now I hunt and peck what I want from all the services. I read all my news from the web sites, which means I'm only wasting time on reading stuff I want to read. I will never again pay for a TV connection but I have to admit I never watch sports and on occasion do long for the channel surfing of yesteryear when I have nothing interesting in my queues.
We ditched cable over 2 years ago. A $40 digital antenna, $80 USB tuner and a spare PC. Couldn't be happier.
The AntiJoey
For the last 2 years I've been using a WD-Live.
It connects to my home network, then I run a program called "PlayOn" on my PC. This shows up as a upnp server on the WD Live, and lets me watch Hulu, CBS, netflix, Amazon VOD, MTV, and a crap ton of other networks for free. I think playon costs like $20 a year.
The WD-Live will also play .mkv and .avi files up to 1080p off network shares.
If you don't mind waiting a week for content, and then only having a subset of available content available.. sure. I find Hulu and Netflix only have about 20% of the content I like to watch. Meanwhile, it's filled with crap i don't like.
You don't get the variety of, say, the discovery channel and History channel via those services because the content is so varied and doesn't lend itself well to a subscription based episodic service. Of course, I consider the cost of cable to be relatively cheap compared to the cost of fast internet in most places.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
I got rid of comcast cable tv when they moved exclusively to Digital. I got tired of paying the same or more and getting less... When comcast decided that they wanted to charge for each tuner... I told them to shove it. I have a antenna and Netflix... I sure don't miss Comcast cable tv... I just wish they didn't have a monoply on high speed internet where I live otherwise, I would dump comcast completely.
Wii + NetFlix + PlayOn
Have been cable TV free for 4 years now. Had it for 1 month when I switched to U-Verse, but only to get free installation with my internet. We hardly ever watched the IPTV when we had it, NetFlix was just so much more convenient (no channel surfing required, no waiting for DVR to record it). Still Standard Definition here though, not sure how things will change when I go HD.
little late to the bus there chief, as most of us discovered computers are easy to hook into tv's and theres tv on the internet, quite a while ago, but whatever ...
I use an XBOX 1, linux and a little murga lua front end I whipped up (see how long? a 8 year old game machine with enough time to fiddle fart the perfect for me UI, ... sorry) works fine for SD tv
XBMC worked much better, but its not actively updated on the XBOX and the plug-ins slowly die.
Bought it first month released. Also do some fox.com for American Dad and Family Guy.
streaming services are great and all, but with the technology available at our finger tips today why not bring the server home? I built a system with an Atom processor, 2 GB of RAM, and 8 TB of hard drive space in a single redundant RAID-Z (6 TB usable), running the newest version of FreeNAS 7 and loaded it up with music, movies, TV shows, etc. and never looked back.
We've been purely Netflix since before they had streaming. I've never been upset on missing out on "Jersey Shore" and the like. I can't imagine wasting money on a television subscription now. Netflix is great for my 2 year old, who loves Backyardigans, Arthur, Busytown, Blues Clues, Barney, Go Diego Go, as well as any number of movies. Watching any episode he feels like watching of any show any time without those brain-washing commercials is great. Plus, we have total control of his media consumption, and can limit or provide as we see appropriate. The only thing missing is that the breadth of shows, while already larger than what I imagine you'd have available from a television network, doesn't include eccentricities such as Bill Nye, Magic School Bus or Imagination Movers. Of course, that's what Netflix DVDs are for...
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
I use Apple TV for newer content and PS3/TiVo for Netflix. I'll also use an antenna for OTA HD viewing. Assuming you get reception, the OTA picture is my higher quality than my cable connection ever was. Live sporting events are crystal clear.
Got rid of cable about 2 years ago. Haven't missed it once.
Boxee for the frontend, Giganews for newsgroups, Newzbin to grab the news feeds, and Sickbeard to grab the shows I watch and update Boxee automatically. Works FABULOUSLY, and it's only about $30/mo for the Giganews subscription.
der dee der.
I don't have cable either. Most of my entertainment (Netflix, Hulu, etc) comes from my internet connection. The rest are from DVD and book purchases.
I've done this. I use the following services:
Netflix (1 DVD at a time, $10/month)
Hulu (free version)
MLB.tv ($100/year)
PlayOn (I got a lifetime license for $30 by getting in early. Now it's $80 for a lifetime.)
PlayOn allows streaming of new shows (Hulu), old shows and movies (Netflix), MLB games, and individual channel sites (like Comedy Central) to my XBox at a total annual cost of $220, or under $20 a month. The only cable service I could get at that price is the super-restricted version that only gives about a dozen channels, most of which I could get OTA anyway.
I get the added advantages of being able to watch everything on my own schedule, and also watch while travelling -- unless I leave the country, which unfortunately blacks out most services. But that's what the Netflix DVDs are for. I rip them to my harddrive as fast as I can get them, and now have a nice stockpile of movies to watch while overseas.
I do. I saved ~$100/month by axing Comcast and downloading torrents of all my favorite shows.
I built an HTPC for ~$600. I use MediaPortal to do playback. The plugins for it do an amazing job of automatically associating files with episodes, downloading art, keeping track of which episodes you've watched, etc. Similar stuff for Movies too. Throw in a Harmony remote and it's even wife-friendly enough that I don't have to do anything. I highly recommend it.
only bottleneck i have is the slow seeders i constantly end up with.
I've been running some sort of non-cable setup to my TV for over 2 years now. Currently I just use a PS3 to stream Hulu+ and Netflix. I also use a free piece of software called PS3 media streamer which allows me to stream stuff that I've downloaded on my office computer to the PS3. The PS3 media streamer software works pretty much flawlessly as long as you've got a good wifi connection. It transcodes any files that the PS3 doesn't natively support on the fly with no visible loss in quality. If there is a sporting event that I must watch, I just hook the laptop up via HDMI and find a free stream on the web.
This is the only way I've known it for the past few years living in San Francisco and NYC. The only thing is that occasionally the internet connection goes down or Netflix goes offline for maintenance, so I do have a few of the most re-watchable TV shows on DVD or iTunes. Oh, and a few shows or networks skip both Hulu and iTunes or are ridiculously overpriced.
A digression: I'd buy both seasons of Community if only NBC didn't have a standard policy of charging 3x more for iTunes versions of their shows than DVDs cost at Amazon. Since I'm moving yet again and have no desire to buy more DVDs only to ship them 1600 miles next month, NBC gets none of my money which I think is part of a misguided intention to prove that iTunes isn't viable -- perhaps they foresaw the Comcast buyout and this strategy is to make whatever shitty service Comcast rolls out for internet TV seem better?
I've been without cable TV for around 6 months now. I have cablevision Optimum online with boost (30/5). I use a combination of Netflix, Playon and a TV antenna for locals. I have xbox 360s in every room with a TV. There is the cost of the xbox live gold subscription, but we have all of the xbox's on an annual family plan of 99.00 for 4 accounts. For movies we want to see that aren't available on Netflix we use a combination of Redbox and Zune video. I also dropped my Optimum Voice in favor of a MagicJack. I have a dedicated media server for play-on and music that's always on, so the magicjack stays connected there. My annual costs, not counting the internet are around $250.00 not counting the internet connection, which I would keep regardless. I can honestly say I see everything that I want to.
I use "free" streaming virtually all of the time where I am, but as odd as this may sound, I still pay for my content. Over here in the uk we have no hulu, we have no netflix, none of the streams coming from the other legitimate sites, all we have is iPlayer, which is a bit of a joke as far as most of its content is concerned. But that's never stopped me, plenty of less legitimate sites out there to give us what we should already have.
However, I don't think the content should be free, it should be available, how it is now illegally, for a reasonable fee (or at least ad supported). But no-one wants my money.. Here's the clincher though, in this country, if we watch anything that is being broadcast on a tv channel at the same time we have to pay a license fee to the government. Technically I don't need to pay it, but I do because it directly supports british content being created. Also, I have an internet connection, which we're pretty much forced to bundle with cable tv and a phone line. So, whilst I use the internet solely for my entertainment, I still indirectly pay what I consider reasonable(ish) for what I'm getting. It's kind of a guilt and responsibility thing.
Now, if the companies pulled their heads out of their asses and provided me with the streaming methods that are clearly feasible, preferably for a reasonable price, then they could drop out the middle men, I would drop the rest and they would get all the cash. But they're morons who would rather whine that they don't have my money rather than actually allow me to give them it. Go figure..
Who need's speling and grammar?
Ditched cable when we bought a house. We've had Netflix the whole time, wife does the CNN dance on her laptop. Netflix is mostly DVD, not much streaming. There's nothing on cable worth watching that I'd pay 1 month's price for the entire year.
I did something like this last year. Wasn't really willing to pay $1000 for a "Media PC", so I bought a Dell from circa 2005 at a local resale shop, P4 2ghz or some such, for $50. Then got an ATI Radeon HD 4000-something off NewEgg for $20. The Radeon 4000 is, AFAIK, the lowest-end card that supports 1080p hardware decoding. ("DXVA support" is the Microsoft buzzword that you need on the hardware + software side for this to work.) 2TB hard drive + USB enclosure for $100. Threw in a cheap BD-ROM drive just for fun ($50).
Total cost: $220. Less if I'd had the parts lying around.
On the software side, with MakeMKV + Media Player Classic, the box can rip + play Blu-Rays at full resolution with 0% processor utilization. Synergy to control from my laptop while sitting on the coach.
The final kicker was that the Adobe Flash team finally got off their collective butts and included support for hardware decoding in Flash 10.2. Hulu, YouTube, and Netflix all look fantastic.
I wouldn't dream of ever going back to cable and trying to program a DVR. Too much work.
And creepy DRM sites don't make it any better.
I recently moved into a new apartment, and elected not to get cable TV. My TV is just a monitor for my server, same as when I was at home. I don't watch TV... If I really want to see a series, I pirate it. Once I have free money, I'd like to buy some of them as well. It's a shame DVD is such a shit format that I'll have to rip it for archiving anyway.
My point is: Everyone who has tried to provide content has fucked it up somehow.
We live in Reston VA, and I have asked Comcast to discontinue our cable service, which is their most basic level, and only retain the Internet service. They told me that if they did this, they would charge me _more_ than if I keep the cable service. They claim that they have no way to centrally disconnect the Internet service: yet they have the ability to centrally turn on and off all other kinds of channels, so I don't think I believe them. I think they just don't want me to disconnect the cable service, so they have engineered it this way.
Therefore, for me, it makes no economic sense to not have cable. However, as it turns out, we don't watch _anything_ on cable. We have both a Roku (with Netflix subscription) and an Apple TV (with an iTunes account), and we stream all content. As a result, we never watch a single advertisement. It is wonderful.
Where I live, I basically have two options for Internet service providers. The one I do not subscribe to is too slow to stream reliably, and costs about $110/mo. Their service is, however, uncapped.
Now, the ISP I do subscribe to has wildly varying bundles and tiers. When I signed up, I wanted unlimited transfers but the only way to to that is to bundle your cable Internet service with cable television. I pay $83/mo for cable television that I don't even use. Seriously, the DVR that came with the service has been sitting unplugged in my entertainment center for four months. My cable Internet service is $65/mo and I was extremely happy with it.
Up until about 5 months ago or so, a new transfer cap was imposed on ALL of their plans. I have the highest tier of service (22Mbps) and I am limited to a monthly transfer of 125GB. The only reason I bundled was because if you didn't the plans were hideously capped (we're talking like 3GB/mo).
The cable company, I'm sure, LOVES all of my free money. I stream our entertainment daily but I would like nothing more than to see some competition here so I can ditch my cable provider once and for all...
I'm considering getting an antenna to get local channels, since they are all HD over the air now, but I haven't bothered.
So the advantages are:
1) Less cost. Even with a few DVDs out at a time, Netflix is less than basic cable. I don't watch a lot of TV (spend too much time playing video games) so I always had trouble with the price of cable. Netflix is cheap enough it is worth it, even if I only watch a half an hour every other day or the like.
2) No ads. Having used Netflix, TV ads annoy me these days. I don't want my viewing broken up so much, so often, by ads. It isn't a deal breaker or anything but I really appreciate ad free viewing.
3) On demand. This is the big one. The show starts when I want, and is what I want. I decide some Futurama is in order? It plays right then and there, no waiting. No surfing saying "Man nothing I feel like watching is on," or coming in half way on a show I like. It starts and ends (and pauses for breaks) on my orders.
The disadvantage? Selection. Netflix has only a limited amount on watch now since the media companies are stupid. Fortunately, it has a large part of the shows I want: Futurama, Family Guy, Law and Order SVU, Top Gear, Myth Busters, etc. However there are others, like the West Wing, that I can't get. Also they don't get new stuff right away. So though they have South Park, I have to wait to watch it, I can't demand to see the current episode.
All in all, was worth it for me. As I said, I don't watch a ton of TV and to get the channels with what I wanted it was like $60-80/month for cable. Then add another $10-15 if I want DVR service and it is just real expensive. Netflix is a much better option.
I've got a Wii which provides Netflix and gaming, and also an attic antenna which gets ~8 channels. We don't watch TV enough to justify cable or satellite.
We've got a DVD library as well, but that won't be used much until my toddler grows out of the "let's play with the SHINY BLUE BUTTON" stage.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
> If you've done this, what does your approach include?
I did this last year. Dumped Comcast TV, kept the Data. Cut my Comcast bill in half. I pay for Netflix streaming. I had a Roku and Google TV, but I recently upgraded to a new TV that includes Netflix and Vudu. I also bought a $20 HDTV Receiver to pick up local broadcasts (works very well). I could add a DVR, but anything I would DVR is pretty much available on Hulu (but that's only on my PC because I don't use it enough to justify Hulu+ on the Roku, ymmv).
> If you'd like to, what are the bottlenecks?
The chief "bottleneck" is that there are too many options (Apple TV, Google TV, Roku, TV's with Apps, etc). You will probably not get the right combo of apps+device+TV on your first pass, thus it will take a few purchases/cancellations/equipment-swaps to get a solution that you like. For instance, I started with the Google TV (which is a decent product), but left if behind (gave it to a friend) when I realized that I only used it for Netflix and my new TV had built-in Netflix.
With digital television I get about 100 channels of commercials I used to see on cableTV, I cut the cord years ago and now that I have been watching a few programs again, I have to say, I am not coming back, it is a waste of time to dodge commercials for little slivers of ever worsening shows. Netflix, Hulu, network streaming, iPad, there are so many ways to get content, I don't miss Blockbuster either, which just closed.
On a related, does the Slashdot crowd have any recommendations for a subscription-free DVR that records over-the-air digital TV, and that has at least two tuners and a decent TV guide? This seems like a no-brainer, but there are very few options out there, such as the CM-7000PAL DVR.
If there is no complete box out there, what would the best setup be for a HTPC to do all this?
I used to love Discovery and the History channel. Then it became all Deadliest Catch/Ice Road Truckers/Axe Men with a side of batshit conspiracy. It's been many years since I subscribed to cable TV.
Broadcast-based media has no place in the digital age; on-demand content is the only logical route at this point.
I am an English speaker living in Germany and getting TV to the home in the traditional way is useless because everything is dubbed. IPTV and DVBT don't provide enough English entertainment for us here. I can get some Freeview channels from the UK over satellite, but need a larger dish and the setup becomes quite expensive because of the costs involved in such a specialized setup.
As such, my TV experience is limited to streaming only. This is not only better than the choice offered by regular TV service here, but opens up a whole new set of possibilities. I am not only watching TV shows from the US, but also from the UK! Of course, being in Germany I cannot exactly access services like Hulu, Netflix or other US only streaming website and nor can I access the UK only streaming options of BBC iPlayer, ITV, 4OD or TVCatchup.
So I have setup a Linux router on which I can turn on a VPN to the US or UK depending on what service I wish to use. A jailbroken AppleTV in the living room is connected to my TV, running XBMC on it. With this, I am able to view BBC iPlayer and 4OD & ITV on demand streaming services. The XBMC TVCatchup application provides all Freeview live channels from the UK for live streaming as well. If I hook up a Xbox/Windows HTPC, using the UK VPN service I can also subscribe to the Sky Player which offers cable only live channels and on-demand cable only shows and a huge collection of movies. But, I found this service to be extensively expensive and so recently dropped it off.
Whenever I feel like viewing the shows from the US, I simple switch the VPN to the US one and off I go viewing the services I want. I have a streaming only Netflix account which is easily used from the AppleTV directly. If I want to use the on demand services of Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central or whatever else, I have PlayOn running on a machine and it works with any UPnP software (like XBMC).
This entire setup cost me €119 for the AppleTV (less than the cost of a decent satellite/IPTV receiver). The VPN service costs me €40 a year and the only recurring cost is that of the Netflix subscription that I have to pay. It works out to a total of about €10 per month. I consider that peanuts compared to the €50 or so I'd have to pay for satellite and still have no access to all the content I want. Of course, this is not considering the massive choice other plugins for XBMC, Boxee and PlayOn bring to the table.
I could never go back to cable or satellite. Streaming is not only the future, but the only sensible way.
I got rid of the cable tv subscription a few months ago. Set up a dedicated computer: Win 7 with, Netflix, Hula, Boxxee etc all running under Windows media center. Netflix subscription $11 a month gets one at a time dvd's and streaming video. Gateway machine was picked up on sale and came set up for media w/ a tv analog and digital tuner, has dual core intel cpu running at 3gig, 6 gig of memory and 1 T hard drive which I rarely use. Still need cable basic subscription w/ hi speed internet to stream and be able to plug coaxial cable connection into back of computer tv tuner. Computer came with handy remote which I use most of the time and I purchased a separate inexpensive small remote keyboard for those times you need one. ... mostly watch netflix because I hate commercials. But can record anything that is playing onto the drive and play back skipping commercials (there is also commercial stripping software available) ... and netflix remembers where I left off on anything I stream or put in the dvd player. Savings over cable supplied movie and extra channel content is significant. I have always felt cable was a ripoff w/ poor customer service. Only tradeoff is I don't get high def all the time ... but that is not important to me. The video quality from Netflix have been fine. Initial outlay for computer was about $500. Keyboard $30.
Bottom line: I would never go back to cable
Al Jazeera English is probably better than any US-based news network. They at least try to dig more deeply into stories, where US-based news is primarily composed of sound bites.
Try it before you pan it.
Technically you DO need a TV license if you watching content in the UK - even if it's on a computer
Got rid of both the TV and cable 12 years ago when the first kid was born. Gave the kids a PC and lots of (video) DVDs that we approved of. Now they're older, they watch (mostly crappy) series on YouTube and get (a little better) TV series in DVD boxed sets (Firefly, Buffy, Red Dwarf, that kind of stuff).
A few years ago we set up an projection system, fed by BluRay, Wii, XBox or, in very rare cases, WinTV on a Boot-camped MacBook. But still (nearly) no commercials.
In the meantime, I can watch important events (elections, catastrophies, playoffs) when I want to, either on a web feed from some news organization, or in HD using the over-the-air digital TV on my Samsung desktop combination monitor/TV.
Still don't pay a penny to anyone except for DVDs, BluRays, and projector bulbs.
No. Well...maybe. Actually, yes. It really just depends.
sabnzbdplus has a plugin to fetch the latest available episode of a series from newsgroups based on season/episode tags, effectively becoming a DVR for ad-free stuff you didn't pay for. I've never used it, though. =)
Been streaming now for 3+ years on DSL at about 2mbps. The quality is good, some times better than others. I have a Roku box, PS3 and do hook the laptop up to the big screen on occasions. Desktop has a pair of 22"s so I watch shows there at times also...
I became the same way, paying outrageous prices just to watch a few channels.
I found that now that over the air TV is digital many of my old channels have multiple options from 24 hour weather, movies, classic TV shows, etc.
I can locally pick up over 20+ HD channels free.
I also found that Netflix fills the void for movies and TV shows that I once watched on cable/sat.
Even my kids, watch Netflix, Youtube for their shows.
I've been cable TV free for almost a year. I use a amplified antenna for Terrestrial TV watching, I steam netflix via PS3. I also use http://www.ps3mediaserver.org/ for streaming downloaded content. The funny thing is that Commercials are now a treat, cause I never see 'em.
HDTV reception gear is quite inexpensive compared to cable fees.
We use MythTV but I understand other packages work as well.
The quality is excellent, much better than Hulu or Netflix for the same show.
You gotta invest in some disk storage if you want to keep more than a few days worth of shows.
Big A la Carte channel fan here and was always irritated cable wouldn't support it. Had never even considered it for individual shows however, but now that NetFlix legitimized that model at the program level I haven't looked back.
So it's streaming to my desktop (soon to be TV), discs by mail for the TV, and 1000s of movies and TV shows ripped to my HD which I stream to a PC or burn and watch on the TV. Local TV weather is now online and local news is available if spotty atm, but I never got into the "eyewitness" thing anyway and don't miss it. Sports, well, never was a fan so that's irrelevent.
All in all I relate to the endless numbers of cable channels like so much excess salt and sugar. Once I cut back I began to dislike foods that were loaded with the stuff, and likewise when I'm visiting someone glued to "The Situation Room" or some other god awful corporate crap my skin crawls.
You can cut off the feed and be healthier for it and still have plenty of video diversions.
- js.
We need all A la carte cable so you can buy the channels that you want I need my CSN Chicago but don't want to pay for crap like lifetime.
the cable companies really need to stop fighting this, before they lose. i know a large and increasing number of people who no longer have cable. netflix alone is enough for many. add hulu, etc and shy of wanting to watch the new shows at release, and not a minute later, and you simply don't need cable.
but because the studios are fighting this movement it's no where near what it could be.
it could be free of "time slots" allowing for anything which is profitable to continue, complete with interactive commercials - allowing you to save a queue of "interested" shows and products for viewing later. it could be uninterruptable commercials (no FF via tivo), but having the ability to search for, say, everything Charlie Sheen has been in, in chronological order, and watch all of them.
and since the cable co's could place ads everywhere, including the browsing menu, across the bottom of the screen, pop-ups like youtube, etc, they could make more $$. the only reason i can think they haven't taken this step is simply control - the big networks would in the same basket as the small guys. but the answer there seems simple to me - make good shows.
We're Netflix DVD+Streaming + Amazon Streaming + OTA Television + Our DVD and Bluray Collection + OTA Radio + Pandora + CD/MP3 Collection for home entertainment.
It's only marginally climate controlled and it's inconvenient. But it is connected to a Mythbuntu box that I thought I would use with the HD Homerun. But the inconvenience factor wins most of the time. I occasionally watch stuff that Miro downloads, but I don't have that many subscriptions and I've only finished the January videos. The TV does receive a few cable channels over the internet-only cable. They don't bother to block all the local programming. I believe that my wife has a couple of stories she follows. She doesn't know how to record with Myth, so if she misses those -- which is the norm -- she watches them on the network website on a PC. The kid's still small, and is happy with the VHS taps she "inherited" from her mom. So that's pretty much solved the cable problem, which I guess means we are streaming-only.
I am not a crackpot.
But what do you use for Internet? Unless you are one of the lucky FIOS ones (lucky bastards) most places DSL sucks compared to cable, and I don't know about everywhere else but I know Cox will NOT sell you net without at LEAST basic included. I ended up just picking up a cheapo USB TV tuner just so I could watch the occasional documentary (I haven't watched TV since Firefly left the air) and to not feel so ripped about having to pay for basic cable that I otherwise would never ever use.
So while I like the idea of getting rid of cable, when the choices are get stuck with basic along with 2Mbit Internet, or take $100 DSL with a MAX speed of 756k and being informed they had NO intention of ever spending a dime and upgrading the lines (Thanks AT&T, you damned leeches) then "cutting the cable" quickly becomes "shooting yourself in the foot" as far as speed is concerned.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
When I moved 2.5 years ago, I never bothered turning on cable (or phone, but that's a different story) in the new place. It was weird because I had just bought a 45 inch TV and it suddenly became a big Xbox monitor. I hooked my PC to the TV (VGA port FTW) and started streaming Hulu and Netflix (been a subscriber since 2003).
A month later I bought a dedicated HTPC, installed XBMC and Hulu Desktop on it, hooked it up with the wonderful USB-UART infrared reader and the free/libre EventGhost software to control everything, bought a cheap universal remote, and I've never been happier.
I easily watch more TV now than I ever did when I had cable. Hulu makes it so easy, Netflix has a great selection if you're not dedicated to watching a specific title, and with XBMC I can watch any of the hundreds of DVDs I've bought. I went from 300 channels of nothing to having more to watch than I have time for.
And all for a total cost of maybe 3 months of cable. 2.25 years ago I broke even and it's been gravy ever since.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
Did this several years ago
I do the combination of DivX Connected boxes (used to work for DivX) and netflix streaming on the Wii.
I dont' watch sports and hate the news so this was an easy switch for me to make.
I would never go back.
Ben...
comcast will find away to take away the free NBC on line stuff and look for them next year to put NHL games on G4 HD just to get Directv to have G4 again.
I pretty much stream what I can (which is almost everything when it comes down to NBC, CBS, MTV, CBC, etc, etc, etc) and have bunny ears for digital signals for news and weather. Everything else I just borrow movies from friends and share when I meet people in real life. Can't say I was a big fan of cable ever and I still have friends that have it so I just watch must see sports at their places. I also detest cable companies and wouldn't want to give them any of my money (especially not more than they already change for internet which is a hoax and a half)
I'm a streamer! Mostly.
Most streaming sources (Comedy Central, ABC News) have really crappy quality. I end up going the old fashioned route for broadcast TV and go home at a certain time and flip on the rabbit ears. OTA HD is really amazing.
For everything else, Netflix, AppleTV, and PS3 fulfill my entertainment needs. The quality of their streams/content are usually very good.
I tried Boxee and most free streamed content just looks terrible on a large HD TV.
Cutting the cord is doable, but you have to keep your expectations low and have to be of the mind of someone who enjoys tinkering for the sake of tinkering. Often, you'll end up tinkering more than couch-potato'ing. If you have a 2-body problem (i.e. significant other), this is an unacceptable solution for the most part, and for good reason. It really shouldn't be that hard to watch what you want when you want it.
So it boils down to how much you watch tv vs how much time you want to spend hunting for content. It's never a free lunch, but if you have a significant-other/family then it's probably not worth the grief.
Avast ye scallywags! Pirate EVERYTHING. TV sucks. Cable sucks. Most movies these days suck. Also, I HATE commercials with a passion. Get a rabbit-ear antenna and a digital converter box, and grab what you can over the air. Additional, I recommend using Pirate Bay for the rest of your TV/movie needs. Stream what is available from free sources, but when you are looking for something they don't have, check the usual torrent sites, and pirate away. Steam to your TV using an Xbox, Xbox360 or PS3. You can nab an original Xbox at a pawn shop for less than $50. Check xbox-scene.com for what serial numbers to look for, and you can get one that is soft-moddable. Put Xbox Media Center on the modded box, and you can watch damn near ANY video format you throw at it. I know it's "wrong" and I don't give a damn. Until the media conglomerates quite treating me like a turd, I don't feel the slightest tinge of guilt for stealing their content. I buy from the terrestrial stations' advertisers, and will go to the theater to watch a movie if it's been vetted online (or I have seen a decent copy that I really liked). Other than that, they can't have my money.
Here's a point of view from another Canadian. I ran my own SageTV/Windows PVR at home for probably 3 years, but now I just use an AppleTV. SageTV with an SD tuner for my satellite connection was fine, but when I bought an HDTV and then an Hauppague HD-PVR, things just got progressively worse. My hardware was starting to get noisier, and I was spending probably 10x as much time messing with the setup as I was spending watching TV. I figured out that we were paying probably $15+ per hour of TV actually watched, and eventually cancelled all of it.
We had also been downloading all our HD shows off the internet for a while anyway, as the %#$#@ content companies DRM the heck out of HD transmissions. We were paying customers, but as usual the companies think it's good business to screw over people who are ACTUALLY PAYING FOR CONTENT. Eventually we had to ask ourselves why we were paying $60 per month for satellite TV and then just downloading all our TV anyway.
Now I only download stuff that I legitimately can't really get any other way, i.e. a couple British shows. Otherwise it's Netflix or iTunes. Some people I know don't like Netflix because they like to watch show X or Y. My wife and I, on the other hand, like to do things besides watching TV and I'm very happy to not have this or that show that I "have" to watch every Thursday night. It's very freeing. Therefore, Netflix suits us fine. With $60 per month saved in satellite TV fees, we'd have to do a LOT of video renting and buying every month before reaching that level.
www.clarke.ca
Only if you're watching it AS it is being broadcast do you need a TV license. If you're watching it After it's been broadcast, i.e. a video on iPlayer you do not need a TV license.
Dumped cable (TV and Internet) in December 2008 and got the mid-range AT&T no-contract DSL for about 1/3 the monthly cost.
Right now we're going with a mix of OTA (local news and hockey, don't give a damn about any other sports), Hulu (simply because it's a relatively good aggregating service), and some network stuff (Comedy Central, History, PBS, etc.) that's not found directly on Hulu.
For news, Al Jazeera is the only one which I'm aware that is legit. I have found some "dubious" sites that rebroadcast national news (well, not any more).
I tried Boxee early on and quite frankly, couldn't stand it. Maybe it's gotten much better now. I hope so. I keep hearing good things.
I have no need for Netflix or anything like that. The local library has a pretty good network here in Southeast Michigan, so getting just about any movie I want just involves a bit of waiting.
I'm almost all streaming. I got rid of Dish Network in favor of an antenna (I'm 30 miles from the nearest transmitter and reception is great) and Netflix. I get the big 4 networks and a few minor channels (CW, religious, etc). Netflix streaming is often criticized for the lack of content, but in the past few months they've really stepped up in terms of TV episodes. Cheers, The Cosby Show, Wings, MacGyver, Scrubs, X-Files, Futurama, South Park, The Twilight Zone and others are now available in their entirety. Yeah these are old, but they're better than 90% of what's on TV now. Did I mention every Star Trek series is coming soon?
Never used DVR functions when I had it with Dish. Only thing I'm going to miss is college football on ESPN. But that was generally 3-4 hours/week for 16 weeks out of a year. I'd rather have the $600/year I'm saving.
Mac mini + plex + remote buddy + logitec harmony
Here in New Zealand we don't really have Cable TV (except a couple of smaller areas). Sky TV (similar to DirecTV) has the whole Pay-TV thing sewn up.
However there is a free to air digital service called Freeview that broadcasts on satellite (PAL 576i) and terrestrial (1080i).
Sky has all the movie channels and all the sport as well as the standard Free-To-Air (FTA) channels, and Freeview has only the FTA channels with a couple of extra's. Sky costs about $100 a month and has only just added a DVR to their service (DVR's didn't really exist in NZ till a couple of years ago).
All the US web based services are blocked, so no HULU or Netflix, and no equivalent services. A couple of the networks have 'TV on demand', but their offerings are very limited. I can completely understand why people here in NZ torrent shows and movies. However a recent three strikes law has just been introduced....
My setup is a mythtv media centre with two satellite freeview tuners (to avoid program conflicts), and we find there are enough *good* shows to get us through the week. If I want to watch the latest Burn Notice, Chuck, or Doctor Who, I am resorted to either get them from iTunes (if they're even offered to our 'region'.) or 'find' them.
Oh yeah, about the internet connection. I pay $70 base rate just for the 6Mbps privilege (does include a $15 VOIP phone line), then $1 per GB of traffic on top of that. So if I use 30GB of traffic costs me $100 bucks. (~USD$70)
So if you haven't picked up on it yet, we're shafted down here. (So quit your whining).
If any of you work for Hulu or Netflix, please bring your catalog and come on down to open your store here....
You only need the license if you watch programmes as they are broadcast (on a computer or a TV set). If it's on-demand streaming then you don't need to pay.
Recently dropped cable and went with an indoor antenna. I live in an area where over the air TV reception is great, and getting network and PBS on HD is a breeze. As others have noted, this part is probably the diciest because not everyone gets great reception, and not everyone is satisfied with the over the air offerings (i.e., live sports, cable-only programming). I supplement with Netflix and ESPN3. It's not the same as cable TV, but, my wallet says "thanks" every month.
Second that. Mainstream media in the US doesn't compare to Al Jazeera English.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act!" -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
I have Cable service for internet and I pay an extra $9 / month for the unadvertised "BASIC basic" service which includes local stations, TBS, WGN, and Nickelodeon. I also have Netflix 5 disc-at-a-time service so between cycling through discs of movies/shows not yet streaming and "play now" options as well as hulu, topdocumentaryfilms.com and the odd "other" streaming content we have far more tv than we care to watch for less than the cost of cable / dish.
I have been meaning to put together a media system (or pickup a roku, boxeebox or something similar) but other than simplifying things, I like my options. I just don't give much of a crap about HD/SD quality, the editorial shows (that have "news" in their names for some reason) or sports, or whatever insipid singing and dancing with the top model chefs show that happens to be popular at this microsecond to care enough to spend more time, money or energy in getting access to more.
You can also do some Blueray players with Netflix. No Hulu though, but I've found the content not so great anyway.
Yeah, well my family had an ALL streaming home entertainment since I was born in 1982. I even used it all the way up through when I went to college. Shocking, I know. You'd even think we were in the future. Now with HDTV each of the main 5 channels I grew up with now has 2-3 "side stations". I would have killed for that amount of PBS growing up.
-
Actually, right now I use: XBMC + SickBeard + SABnzbd. With a 'pay as you go' setup from Astraweb. 180GB lasts me 4-5 months of regular programming and all summer. (An costs as much as 2.5 months of 'all you can eat'.).
My apartment sits across the street from a Laundromat that advertises 'free internet' (I didn't see any mention of customers only), DD-WRT in client mode feeds my OpenWRT router.
I tried this w/ a Clear 4G "unlimited" wireless connection. I watched Hulu, Netflix and used Internet TV in Windows Media center w/ Win7. I also used it for Steam games. It didn't work out because I got throttled for using over 6GB of data in 1 month. (I assume it was purchasing new games on Steam that did it.)
I called Clear and was told that although they advertise Unlimited data usage my usage was being limited because I used an unreasonable amount of data. (Yes they said my usage was unreasonable.)
National Geographic still runs quite a lot of good stuff.
Discovery though has spiraled into the pit of reality shows :p
I've been doing this for longer than most, I suppose. I cut cable back before Hulu went public (though I was in the beta for it, performance was somewhat lacking at the time).
I rent a room in a house with a bunch of guys. People come, people leave; now there are 3 of us, and none of us are using the cable tv subscription. We all stream via Hulu, Netflix, etc.
My setup is as follows: a desktop below a wall mounted 40" HDTV in my bedroom, wireless keyboard, mouse, and remote. I've had both Netflix and Hulu Plus subscriptions in the past, but I've been pretty good about cancelling them when I find I don't use them for a while. Hulu provides a lot of good content, and plus gives some of that content in HD, and some additional content, but retains it's ad-supported model. This isn't as bad as it sounds, however, as studies have shown that people actually enjoy TV programs more when they're given ad breaks. Oftentimes, when an ad comes on Hulu, I'll escape out of fullscreen and switch tabs on my browser to my email or rss reader to briefly check up.
I also enjoy watching anime, and there's plenty of that streaming online, as well as fansubs.
Of course, though I would like to watch A Game of Thrones (for example), I won't. I'm not going to pay cable+hbo fees for months just so I can have it trickled to me when they feel like showing it. When the DVD/BDs come out, or when it comes out streaming, I'll rent or purchase them. The whole reason I got a Netflix subscription in the first place was to watch Battlestar Galactica. I kept it long after, since their queue functionality paired with malleable and expanding streaming options provide a good value over time.
I'd more readily adopt a hybrid micropayment solution from Hulu, however: let me give you some money up front, and then give me access to HD streams, restricted content, and the ability to bypass ads - combined in any mix I see fit, for a certain amount per episode or minute of ads skipped. When my payment runs out, let me know so I can fund it again.
Haven't had any form of cable since I bought my house. HDTV, PS3, digital antenna, Logitech Z5500's and a media server running a streaming app is what I have. I use Powerline networking adapters to get my network from one side of the house to the other. This takes care of most of what I need, though I still plan to add an HTPC so I have a few more streaming options. It's just not a priority right now.
NO. Next question?!
I haven't subscribed to cable for years. I recently moved to an area with Comcast (and no other competition above 1Gb/s) so now I'm stuck with a 250GB cap for the last couple of months, but I just have to keep an eye on it starting around half way through the month to make sure I don't get close.
I use Netflix on my PS3 for most stuff and Boxee on an HTPC that I built for other online streaming stuff. Unfortunately, Boxee for the PC hasn't been updated in a while because they are concentrated on the Boxee Box platform and the streaming sites (such as Hulu) have been purposely breaking Boxee for a while (due to the networks' interference), so I have been looking for alternatives that allow me to use a remote control rather than needing a keyboard and mouse. And for local news I use broadcast. With digital, broadcast TV is much better quality than it used to be. Anything I can't get through those I can always buy or rent the DVD. Overall, it takes a little patience and some knowhow on finding content, but it's worth it.
Torrents + Tvduck.com + Netflix = everything
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
i've been doing this for two years. Guess it's pretty Ghetto, but I just use my laptops svideo out port.
The main issue I ave is that my wifey watches things like Amazing Race and Survivor... (geck...) None the less... So I have to accommodate her need to see these programs ON THE DAY THEY ARE BROADCAST.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
For the nth time: If it becomes OK to infringe copyright in both GPL programs and closed-source programs, then the Free Software Foundation has already won. No copyright means it becomes OK to make and share thoroughly commented disassemblies of proprietary programs.
I chose not to get cable, or even to take a free TV which was offered to me. I watch a good deal of shows/movies on Hulu, and a couple shows on Revision3.
Cable companies are way out of line. When I lived with my parents, I would often become very irritated with shows being low-volume, but commercials being ridiculously loud. It even woke my family up a couple of times. Intolerable. I'm also disgusted with the idea of paying so much for a service, AND having to be bombarded with commercials. One or the other is okay. But both is ridiculous. Not to mention that the vast majority of content made available simply sucks. I'm not keen on supporting a company which pays into bullshit like "Jersey Shore" or most of the youth-corrupting MTV productions.
I'll sooner abandon TV shows and movies than buy into the current state of TV entertainment. Books are still great entertainment.
Because I'm a married man. My wife could certainly learn how to use a streaming setup (she already uses Netflix on our Wii and on our Blu-ray plaeyer), but it really doesn't cover all of what we want. We also have playon.tv, which gets a few more things for almost no money, which is OK.
But in the end, cable TV is just more convenient. It works consistently and if something is wrong you know what to do immediately.
Although on top of that, where we live cable TV is the only option for high speed internet. So if we switched to streaming-only, we'd still be paying a monthly fee to the cable company.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I have "a friend" who uses that all the time.
We did have the 'every channel under the sun' package, but typically we were watching stuff through Mythdora anyway, so...we cut back to basic cable. That still wasn't really worth it, so...
We ditched the TV programming on our cable subscription about a year ago and now only get internet through Time Warner. 2 Roku boxes and a wii...love it.
As an added bonus (?) apparently the tech hasn't caught up to this sort of situation yet, so we still got about 20 digital channels, and a handful of analog ones even after we were 'shut off' so we still get some cable programming. Not that we watch it more than an hour or so per month.
Netflix - best thing since sliced bread. Priced right, we do the DVDs along with the streaming, LOTS to watch. I've got nothing against reruns, mostly because you *know* it's going to be good vs. the crap that's being broadcast currently.
Hulu - eh. it's OK, had it for about 4 months now, but they don't add new content quickly enough, and I've already exhausted most of the stuff I am interested in, so I'll probably cancel it.
Amazon - well...I was a prime member anyway, so I use it occasionally, but...not worth it otherwise. I've yet to notice them add any content since their initial release.
Crackle - nice stuff...still getting their act together, but for a commercial-supported free service, they have some really good offerings in their catalog. If they can keep the catalog fresh, they'll do very well.
Youtube - actually somewhat useful from time to time
At this point, I'm really thinking we're in the 'too good to last' stage of streaming. I'm waiting for TW to come knocking at the door with a new fee for streaming, or some sort of bandwidth cap/throttling. It's nice while it lasts though.
Been there done that. I used my appetite for anything hackable and bought a TiVO back in 2002 then graduated to a homebuilt MythTV in 2005 once SDI quality video became computer files and MythTV began overloading me with files I just didn't have time to watch. I cut the Cable cord and kept Internet only. iTunes was a great training ground for picking and choosing the content I actually wanted to watch when I wanted to watch it.
The whole experience taught me that Entertainment via the TV Broadcast and weekly series thing is an addiction that can be broken simply by realizing there is more content out there than you could possibly consume in a lifetime. At some point it becomes boring.. and that's good for the pocket book. So then came NetFlix.. and that taught me it was foolish to try and keep up with the latest greatest movies out at the Video store or the Theatre.. sooner or later they end up on NetFlix.. but you know what.. the Personal Queue at Netflix let me build this huge imaginary library of things I thought I wanted to watch.. that had to compete with sleep.. and other things I'd rather be doing.. so I started walking.. spending more time in the kitchen and loosing weight.. going to the gym.. the "Overload" of afforability.. accessibility.. convenience just "killed" the Video Enterainment buzz for me.. it became uninteresting.
Now I regularly get iTunes to download only three video podcasts per week, have Netflix (1) DVD a week with unlimited streaming account.. (I watch something on Sunday about twice a month) and last bought a movie online through iTunes like three months ago. It's a chore to just get through this much media in a week.
Sometimes I discover something on Netflix or Hulu like "Being Human", "NCIS" or "Merlin" and run a mini-marathon in the summer over a Saturday.. but I rarely follow up with additional "Seasons" of the same.. too much work.. and the quality drops off. I never saw a single episode of "Lost" and after people told me "get with it you got 5 seasons to watch and catchup with before the finale..." that was such a buzz kill I never even looked it up on NetFlix.. my life is just a bit more unique and personal than that.. consumer programming is becoming less and less appealing.. its just not personal enough to hold my interest. I don't read a lot of paper books.. mostly digital journals these days.. but I can recall the personal experience of picking up a hand held analog book and reading that cover to cover.. that was cool.. TV has just accelerated away from that to mass produced porage that looks really unappealing.. worse I feel sad seeing friends kids glued to a TV set with an iPhone in their hands texting and getting overweight.
I don't think there with be so much a bandwidth crisis.
I think there will be some Darwinian evolution biologically.. perhaps a mass purge is in the works.. and demand may decrease soon. Beside we'll find more efficient codecs and protocols.. seems odd doesn't it we transmit high resolution pictures when we have a finite set of rods and cones in the eyes.. and our brains fill in much of the picture, colors, sounds sights and smells with less input than we're capable of actually percieving.. Retina display? why not just a transduction "implicit" display that maps images only into the field of vision the brain is actually paying attention to.. how about a "Hyper-perception display" which can sense where your looking and paint more detail in that field of view.. like Layers only for reality. .. just sayin
Dropped cable tv, just internet now. Save $50 / month xbox 360 (new) for gaming and netflix, PC for t0rrented 1080p movies and web sites, etc
That's a great solution if you like NBC. I however recently realized I'd not watched a single NBC show in over two years, and the other networks all have their own methods of getting their content out on the 'net. So until there's a single aggregator of TV networks, I think it's rather tough to bypass cable/satellite and use the internet to watch network TV. Unless there's some non-Hulu method I'm missing.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Technically you DO need a TV license if you watching content in the UK - even if it's on a computer
Not true.
From another page on the linked site:
You don't need a licence if you don't use any of these devices to watch or record television programmes as they're being shown on TV - for example, if you use your TV only to watch DVDs or play video games, or you only watch programmes on your computer after they have been shown on TV.
And another, specifically metioning streaming.
If you don’t watch or record television programmes, or you only stream TV programmes online after they’ve been broadcast – through on-demand services like YouTube, BBC iPlayer and 4oD – you don’t need to be covered by a TV Licence.
We gave up cable several years ago and got rid of the TV too. Since then, we've purchased a 32" HDTV and built a small ATOM/ION-based HTPC that sits right behind it. Netflix and Hulu work quite well, as do most of the network streaming sites. We can access these through Boxee, which is an almost-great piece of software with a couple of major issues (especially on low-power systems like mine). Flash 10.2 is not supported in Boxee for Win/Mac/Linux at the moment, and development seems to be somewhat stalled out in favor of the Boxee Box hardware - a bummer, as the Boxee interface is really easy to navigate. I'm hoping for an update in the near future, otherwise I'll be looking for new frontend software. The only thing I really miss is sports. I'd gladly pay MLB for the ability to stream local baseball, but I'm in my team's "blackout zone" and can't get access. I WANT to give them money to watch baseball, and they won't take it.
Netflix has a very limited selection of streamable movies. Nearly everything I really would like to watch as a one-off (EG, something I dont want to buy, but feel like watching once, without going to a rental place) is not available for streaming.
Last night, for example, I wanted to watch a scifi comedy-- So, I did a short list (no particular order)
Spaceballs
Dr. Strangelove (Or how I learned to love the bomb)
Back to the future (Any)
Real Genius
and a few others.
NONE are available for streaming.
However, if you are into Stargate, or Doctor Who, or that lot--- You can find whole seasons available for streaming.
They have lots of TV shows, though I have never been big into TV.
My personal suggestion to somebody that wants to use the computer as a playback device for a really big monitor (Like an HDTV with HDMI) is to use a small HTPC, and a NAS, and to go ahead and just digitize their DVD collections. (Or, just resort to plain old piracy and keep good quality rips on the NAS.)
Netflix would be awesome if they could get better agreements with media owners for streaming. As is though, it's deffinately a crapshoot.
I suppose between them and Hulu you could have a reasonable selection--- but they are still no match for the availability of a local collection on a nice NAS box.
What I personally have done, is saddle a big USB2.0 drive enclosure to my XBOX360 for the local movie archive, and use my Wii for Netflix. (*WOULD* use the 360 for it, but Microsoft in their infinite wisdom require you to have a gold membership with a monthly subscription to use netflix on their box, essentially double dipping you for the priviledge. Netflix on Wii is free as far as the wii side of things is concerned-- just the 8$/mo streaming service fee, which is quite affordable. I get that much use out of it monthly, easily.)
That way I just sit on my couch and use a controller to pick what I want to watch, instead of having to fumble for discs. The 360 does high definition playback with AC3 audio for local media, and supports generic Mpeg4 AVI (Unless you really really WANT to use Windows media codecs....) and does so pretty much out of the box these days. (My console is an older one that had to pull an update, but it does it as soon as you try to play a media file that needs it.) That means you can have a high quality BD dump, and play it back fine.
I DO have an actual computer stashed under the entertainment center, but I rarely make use of it, instead doing the streaming from the game consoles because of increased ease of use, and quicker startup times.
Trust me, if you are a disorganized slob like me, (Or you have children that are hell bent on destroying shiny objects like DVDs and BDs) being able to browse your movie archive digitally without leaving your couch is damn convenient, especially since you can change movies painlessly on the go, and not have to put things up. You can put your original discs in a brinks security box, and stash it someplace and be all good.
Between Hulu, Netflix, and specific news/sports/comedy sites, I get just about everything I want without the cable TV bill. Anything else I can download from [not sayin]. I'm on a business level account with Comcast, so I never hit any bandwidth caps, and I download and stream a ton. Use a particular VOIP provider for phone, too. So all I need is my Internet. Depending on if the kid has the TV in use or not, I can watch content with my HD Live, Xbox, or go to my room and watch everything on my big monitor on the PC. With this setup, I regularly watch: House Big Bang Theory How I Met Your Mother Smallville Craig Ferguson Bleach (Subbed) The Daily Show Plus all those old shows I go back and re-watch. and more... Oh yeah, and movies, too!
This sig intentionally left blank.
I recently upgraded the TV to an LG flat panel, and LG offered to knock $100 off the price for taking a blu-ray player too. The disk player is *meh*, but the internet connection (NetFlix, YouTube, variety of other stuff i don't use) is pretty cool. The interface could be better, and I'm always wanting a keyboard for YouTube searches, but it's a step in the right direction. NetFlix is addictive, but LG needs enhancements:
1) Contents of firmware revisions public
2) User editable interface
3) Drastic improvement to YouTube skin/app.
4) Access to broadcast TV - if only a passthrough of antenea
The LG box also generates periodic 1s blackouts with particular DVD/resolution combinations. If you select a lower res it goes away, but it's annoying to be changing the res if you want to watch a disk.
I cancelled my cable/satellite a few years ago when I was unemployed. I had an old gaming computer laying around with DVI-out. I bought a DVI-to-HDMI (Same video signal, just no audio) cable and plugged the computer into my tv and the audio jack into my receiver. I stream Netflix through the Wii and can watch DVD/Blu-ray through the computer.
Tivo + 2 powered antennas. Netflix + googleTV provides most everything we can't get over the air.
Your monitor is staring at you.
I agree completely. I have both Netflix and a big old school DVR setup (3 replaytv's, 2 local servers running DVarchive to archive shows permanently and a cable hookup.) We just started in on Netflix a few months back and I have to say, I really like where that is going. Having the technology in my home to store things locally and share them around the house with ethernet in real time is cool, but my machines are aging and there is no modern equivalent. I'd much rather have a larger library full of pristine digital copies stored offsite and streamed whenever I want them. My daughter who is 6 grew up able to watch her favorite shows whenever she wanted. The replays I have are the old school ones before the media companies sued the automatic commercial skip out of them, but its not perfect and I much prefer the way Netflix just has none.
That said, cable companies and media producers understand that their model is at risk of being undermined and the price for Netflix to come up to being on-par with cable in terms of show availability is going to be steep. They won't be able to do it at $10 a month, thats for sure.
Still, if I could pay Netflix what I pay the cable company today (about $70 a month) and get all the same shows streamable any time from any of my TVs or computers with no commercials, it would be a no-brainer. I'd toss all my replays and all my archived shows and convert over in a second.
Ultimately, I think standard cable television is doomed. Nobody wants their content delivered that way. The cable companies will fight with everything in their power, but at the end of the day, you're going to be paying them for internet and internet only eventually. That's why the caps are showing up everywhere. They're deathly afraid of this, but like a good internet, it will eventually simply route around any attempts at censorship.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
I cancelled my cable and Netflix and now just torrent everything I want to watch (set up to automatically grab new episodes as soon as they hit the tracker) and stream stuff when available and I don't mind the lower quality. Get something like a Mac mini and a nice IPS display and you're set. It does so much more than a set top box and a TV, it's brilliant, and so much cheaper than paying for all those services that we don't really need anymore.
I'm setting my parents up with the same system. I'm not sure why more people don't do this.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
I use a PS3 as a center for streaming, a homebrew router takes care of streaming any content I may have on my network, and I have a USB ATSC tuner. Oh, and a coat hanger for an antenna.
I only pay for internet and Netflix.
I'm almost completely streaming - I certainly don't have the expensive premium TV. I purchased a Sony Bravia last year that came with a WIFI connector, and the TV supports "apps." I have super-basic cable (just local channels in HD - I considered using the antenna) - plus the medium speed internet access for $45/mo. You can't stream using 1.5mbps connection (I tried, it's okay for SD but not HD, so I upgraded).
The TV supports Netflix directly - so I signed up for Netflix Streaming Only. The TV also has a few other free streaming channels built in. So that's it.
Hulu Plus isn't worth it. (which is also built into the Sony). I tried it for the free 30days and cancelled it. It was nice having the TV like experience, but the Plus doesn't stream the same content that the Free on your PC version does. None of the most current shows are available on Plus (but are on the Free PC version) - I wasn't going to pay for less content... it was the whole reason... trying to go streaming only.
So now I watch Hulu via my laptop plugged into the TV via HDMI. -- and I keep a wireless mouse on the couch so I can close the ads. Hulu is my DVR, Netflix for older movies and past TV seasons.
And I use RedBox for the occasional current movie.
I am an English speaker living in Germany and getting TV to the home in the traditional way is useless because everything is dubbed. IPTV and DVBT don't provide enough English entertainment for us here. I can get some Freeview channels from the UK over satellite, but need a larger dish and the setup becomes quite expensive because of the costs involved in such a specialized setup. As such, my TV experience is limited to streaming only. This is not only better than the choice offered by regular TV service here, but opens up a whole new set of possibilities. I am not only watching TV shows from the US, but also from the UK! Of course, being in Germany I cannot exactly access services like Hulu, Netflix or other US only streaming website and nor can I access the UK only streaming options of BBC iPlayer, ITV, 4OD or TVCatchup. So I have setup a Linux router on which I can turn on a VPN to the US or UK depending on what service I wish to use. A jailbroken AppleTV in the living room is connected to my TV, running XBMC on it. With this, I am able to view BBC iPlayer and 4OD & ITV on demand streaming services. The XBMC TVCatchup application provides all Freeview live channels from the UK for live streaming as well. If I hook up a Xbox/Windows HTPC, using the UK VPN service I can also subscribe to the Sky Player which offers cable only live channels and on-demand cable only shows and a huge collection of movies. But, I found this service to be extensively expensive and so recently dropped it off. Whenever I feel like viewing the shows from the US, I simple switch the VPN to the US one and off I go viewing the services I want. I have a streaming only Netflix account which is easily used from the AppleTV directly. If I want to use the on demand services of Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central or whatever else, I have PlayOn running on a machine and it works with any UPnP software (like XBMC). This entire setup cost me €119 for the AppleTV (less than the cost of a decent satellite/IPTV receiver). The VPN service costs me €40 a year and the only recurring cost is that of the Netflix subscription that I have to pay. It works out to a total of about €10 per month. I consider that peanuts compared to the €50 or so I'd have to pay for satellite and still have no access to all the content I want. Of course, this is not considering the massive choice other plugins for XBMC, Boxee and PlayOn bring to the table. I could never go back to cable or satellite. Streaming is not only the future, but the only sensible way.
Finally cut the cord at the end of December last year and rely exclusively on AT&T U-verse (12 down, 2 up). We were early adopters in the neighborhood; most of the problems we had were around billing. Full story is here: http://alternate-u-verse.blogspot.com/
Vision with execution is hallucination.
News has gotten progressively more useless, to the point where it actually annoys me to watch it
Al Jazeera English is what we used to call 'news', before CNN/Fox/HLN/MSNBC went to the all-scandal-and-entertainment format.
I get it for part of the day on LinkTV, which is 9410 on Dish Network.
I buy their $20/mo DishFamily package, which has lots of "basic-cable" channels, and several kids' channels. It's not advertised but you can order it.
The bandwidth of satellite can't be beat - no transfer caps to worry about or drop-outs unless there's a monsoon going on. I got a Dish 301 receiver for $40 on eBay and the dish itself from FreeCycle. I bought my own high-quality RG6 cable for a long-distance run.
I still stream stuff from Netflix (Hulu), YouTube (Hulu), and CWTV (Flash on Firefox on the MythTV box) but for TV news, NASATV, kids shows, etc. it's from the satellite.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Believing a la carte would save you any money is like believing a buffet restaurant would be less expensive if you could custom design their menu for your choosing.
Matter of fact didn't even have a TV for the longest time. Finally bought one that was refurbished and in what I considered a fair price range for a 40" 1080p unit. Yes, $350.
I'm feeling the pressure to get cable again but I refuse to pay $107 a month for the cable and net service. We get about a dozen stations with a cheapo antenna and I'd rather spend a few dollars to setup a mast, rotor and antenna than to pay the cable company.
I have a Wii but I don't like that it's video out is only 480i. So I'll pay the $79 for a Roku box. But I won't get cable again. Their day is past.
And to those who think ala carte would mean cheaper cable, wrong. The reason you have such odd bundles on cable is because they are being forced to carry leaders with non-leaders in the group. If you did ala carte, you'd pay MORE for the popular channels and the effect would be paying MORE overall.
As to video services, I have a Netflix account, watch Hulu online, have a MegaVideo subscription, and yes, even several good YouTube subscriptions. Why do I need cable?
I've *completely* switched to streaming. I didn't expect to, but it just happened after I got an Apple TV (Gen 2). I tried Netflix on a whim, and wow... that's all.
Netflix has a large selection that's gotten better over time. I did it to watch a movie from time to time, but it turns out TV programs are actually pretty cool.
Lots of scifi, no waiting, no filling up the DVR. Firefly, Stargate, the Sarah Connor Chronicles, Farscape, Dr. Who. You can watch the whole season in a few days or over a month... (Now the scifi is for me, but the rest of the family is hooked on other stuff, like disney)
The Apple TV is cheap ($89) and has a great user interface. Even the inexperienced young and untrainable old around the house have learned to use it. The quality is great for me.
I have 6m DSL and a 27 and 32 inch sets. Haven't really tried lower speeds or larger sets, so I can't comment there. On my laptop, stuff looks great (especially the HD content).
All this is pretty cheap, waaay cheaper than satellite or cable.
Honestly, I don't take full advantage of the rest the AppleTV offers. I do use youtube from time to time, and the family pulls up internet radio for some music. But mostly I don't rent movies from apple, and only rarely integrate with itunes.
Months ago we moved entirely to windows media center, netflix/amazon/hulu and conventional antenna, and dropped cable TV. It's more convenient and a fraction of the cost.
One of the big problems with cable service and cable provided set-top DVRs is that the cable companies, under the mistaken impression that they were the only game in town, priced themselves right out of the market. The service was hidiously expensive (essentially buying the hardware over and over each month), didn't work very well, and had a tiny amount of storage by today's standards, with no realistic way to upgrade. Well guess what, they're no longer the only game in town. The media center has its problems, but I can own terabytes of new storage for the cost of renting gigabytes of storage. There's just no comparison. I think the cable companies are only going on inertia now. You really only need internet and telephone these days. Scratch that, you only need internet these days.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Devices: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Apple TV
Movies & TV Shows: Netflix Streaming, iTunes, Vudu and CinemaNow.
Music: iTunes, Napster and Pandora.
It'd be really nice if Showtime and HBO wouldn't horde their shows until two weeks before the new season was going to start. I used to watch Dexter and quit since they have no model in place for me to keep current without all the extra cable related stuff previously mentioned.
I also have a ReadyNAS duo where I store my ripped DVD copies on to playback on my devices. Having to dig out physical media and load it into a player is so 1990.
While some of the programming is slow to be posted to Hulu, my family and I are happy only shelling out $8.00/month to netflix. When I look at all the money I spent to both dish network and Directv it still makes me sick. For several years I fought with Directv to get the "Free" upgrades that new customers got. I left when they started jacking around my bill and not keeping agreements. Dish wasn't much better. The reception sucked, had them out several times to "re-aim the dish" to improve the signal. Then they too started charging for services that were supposed to be free. Then they stared tacking on more fees and charges and soon I was paying more but getting less. Since going to streaming, my kids love the cartoons on demand, I love being able to watch episode after episode of my favorite shows. Going back just isn't an option any more. We even live close enough where all the network stations can be viewed by antenna. It's wonderful!
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
When my DirecTV bill was starting to approach $80 a month, and realized we didn't watch much of anything other than the broadcast networks, we ditched it. Now our setup is OTA Antenna, fed into a Tivo HD, and we use Netflix streaming to supliment everything we can't get OTA. OTA HD is noticeably better quality than cable or satellite, and not hard to pick up provided you don't live in a valley. Built a home antenna out of wire coat hangers, and can pull in 30+ channels ranging from 10 to 60 miles away. Total monthly cost: around $20 a month between Netflix and Tivo ( we pay for the Tivo service once a year for $129 ).
But what do you use for Internet? Unless you are one of the lucky FIOS ones (lucky bastards) most places DSL sucks compared to cable, and I don't know about everywhere else but I know Cox will NOT sell you net without at LEAST basic included. I ended up just picking up a cheapo USB TV tuner just so I could watch the occasional documentary (I haven't watched TV since Firefly left the air) and to not feel so ripped about having to pay for basic cable that I otherwise would never ever use.
I have COX here in Arkansas and I have and only pay for cable internet. They even came out and placed a trap on my line to prevent tv signal. and I only pay $49 + tax for this speed. "http://www.speedtest.net/result/1263294364.png" I do believe if you were told you HAVE to include basic cable it was a flat lie. I was a technician for COX for 9 yrs and even when they rolled out cable internet in AR and KS they couldnt force you to get tv service (although most people didnt know this at the time).
M O O N... That spells Slashdot.
I ditched cable 3 years ago and have been using MythTV to record HDTV OTA ever since. Years ago I used to use Myth as well with cable, but only in standard def. Boy has it come along way!
Using 3 HD Homeruns with dual tuners, I can record up to 6 programs at a time in 1080i.
For the specialty channels that are not available OTA, I can't stream them from the websites (-- Canada --), so I use SABnzbd to watch an RSS feed and auto download any desired content from the binary groups. It works slick.
Nothing that is streaming comes close to the audio or visual fidelity to run on the $$$ equipment I buy.
I can download stuff off USENET that is pretty high quality...but then again...not immediate and I do enjoy watching live TV networks, some sporting events...etc.
I guess the hulu and streaming only crowd will be ok if they don't have nice equipment, or not that much of a tv hound....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I use Cox and only pay for internet. $45 a month for 15Mb isn't a bad deal. I haven't paid for cable TV in over two years. I'm in southern Arizona FWIW.
Getting back on topic I use Netflix, Hulu, and a few station websites like Adult Swim. The quality of the station websites always suck compared to Netflix or Hulu. There are only a few things I can't stream. For some, I wait until the DVDs are available and either buy them or Netflix them. If I know I'll buy the DVDs, I'll downloading torrents, but I prefer to get things legitimately whenever possible.
The only thing that I miss these days is baseball and the Superbowl. MLB.tv would be a great service if it weren't for the draconian blackout rules. $120 for the premium service is a little steep but I would gladly pay it if I didn't have to worry about blackout rules. Since I can't, MLB has lost a paying customer. I'll give them another chance in the future if they change their policy.
I have DSL through AT&T. (They have some name for it, but basically it means I don't have phone service or anything, just the DSL). I then have vonage for my phone, and I use netflix streaming to a wii to get the majority of shows and movies. I also use playon.tv to watch hulu through the wii as well. That takes care of most of the "current" shows. Playon also has direct support for espn, syfy, cbs, pbs, amazon VOD, and several other web streams. All told, I pay $35/mo for the DSL, $11/mo for the netflix, and I paid a one time fee of $80 for playon.
I moved to northern Michigan in 1997 to get married. Up there the only option for TV was satellite. We decided to try and do without because I had a huge VHS collection. We've never had TV since.
Right now I have 1000+ DVDs and 20,000+ MP3s (and elsewise, all legally purchased) ripped to an HP MediaSmart Server. I stream these movies to our three TVs using WD Live TV Plus (one for each TV). The WD has Netflix which we use constantly, and Pandora, which we use frequently. The living room TV and our bedroom TV have Rokus attached so we can use Hulu Plus. My mom (who lives with us, being disabled) watches Hulu on her laptop instead of on her TV.
Watching commercials on Hulu Plus is bizarre. We only just set up our account, and before that we've been commercial-free for 14 years. Very jarring.
The only real downside is the WD boxes because the UI is so bad, and they won't play Columbia Tri-star iso files (and some others). Dude. A DVD player is digital, and they can play any type of DVD. VLC plays Columbia Tri-star just fine. Why can't WD do it? Why can't they fix the little niggling UI issues that drive their users crazy?
I would love to use Boxee because the UI is beautiful, but you have so little control over your Cover Art, and that's a deal breaker for me. From what I've seen, no one has yet nailed a digital streaming box.
Oh, and I have a friend who records F1 races using a Tuner card, writes them to DVD and lets me borrow them.
The only thing I miss from traditional TV is watching football.
I just this week got an iPod and had it hooked up to my car stereo.
I love digital media.
...because there are a lot of commenters that are very proud of ditching cable, pay only $20/$30/$40 for Netflix/Hulu/blah blah blah...but what are you paying for internet access?
I pay $100 for my cable service, and that includes high-speed Internet (well, fast enough I can stream Netflix with no troubles). This includes a couple hundred digital channels as well. I really doubt all of you who have ditched cable are on dial-up. So let's be honest here: If you're going to tell us how much you saved by getting rid of cable, tell the whole story by telling us how much you pay for internet access.
I've had Netflix for about 5 years. Aside from a VCR/DVD player, I've also got a Roku box, an Apple TV (first gen and hacked), an iPad2, a computer (Ubuntu/Win7), a Wii, and an antenna (which I never use) connected to my living room TV.
The streaming quality from Apple is not bad. The resolution is 1080p but the frame rate is not so great. This becomes really apparent during scenes where the camera pans. Overall the Apple TV performance is good. Amazon video is not quite as good as Netflix. They seem to compress more and they have less HD content. I can stream Netflix from my Wii, Roku, or the computer. The Wii is only 480p so we will not talk about that. The Roku (720p) and computer (1080p) performance is variable. On a good day the pictures are sharp and vibrant. On a typical day there will be some pixelation while playing movies. This has become worse and worse over time. I've checked my network when this happens and it's always fine.
My conclusion is that the Netflix issue is due to a bottleneck on the remote end or somewhere in the middle. Either Netflix does not have a sufficiently wide pipe, or Verizon is traffic shaping somewhere near their backbone. Another alternative is that Neflix is just compressing the content as much as they can until a certain percentage of subscribers complain.
Anyway I don't miss the satellite bills. I've got two kids and neither of them noticed that I had pulled the plug on the sat TV until a month after it had been shut off so it really was no loss at all.
but like a good internet, it will eventually simply route around any attempts at censorship.
I used to be a big believer in "the Internet routes around any attempts at censorship" but then the ChiComs slapped me in the face with a big wet tuna.
And then Big ISP remembered that they effectively hold us by the short and curlies.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I boycotted cable after my apartment burned down last year. After about 6 months of nothing but youtube and crappy low quality internet streams, I finally caved and got DirecTV. I still hate paying for the service, but it is really nice having the option of not having to 'digg through the crates' in order to find something to watch, when I feel like being spoonfed by the programming networks.
The fact that I had bought a 1080p LED samsung TV, and was subjecting it to nothing but netflix via netbook or xbox, sure was visible once I plugged-in my DTV box and got actual HD video. HUGE difference, I don't care what any stream-only advocate says. The bandwidth and programming simply isn't there just yet.
This is the decade of death for the big broadcast networks and providers though, I can safely say (as I said in 1998 about the record industry).
My point is that media distribution models can co-exist and offer a much better "I'm in control" experience for the user, rather than being subjected to one or the other, or being constantly spoonfed, if you can afford it.
the only permanence in existence, is the impermanence of existence.
Yes, actually, it is. Al Jazeera is has remarkably high journalistic standards. They're thorough, generally correct, and surprisingly unbiased. They're unquestionably superior to any US cable news, and usually more in-depth in their stories than the BBC.
What are you streaming Netflix on, a Wii?
On the Xbox 360 or Windows Media Center, Netflix HD looks better than my digital cable ever did.
I assume the PS3 is similarly good quality.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
I second that, I am with Cox in Central Florida, in an Internet only plan at 54.99 per month.
My wife and I gave up TV and snagged one of the internet-only packages that our local ISP was running to try and compete with the expanding selection of other competitors. To my TV I have a DVI -> VGA (My spare card doesn't have HDMI out) for video output and a 3mm -> RCA converter for sound. Our "remove control" consists of a VNC server on the media system (a tower system with fairly low specs I assembled from spare parts) and a VNC program on one of our laptops (which we keep out anyways). It actually serves its purpose without needing to go out and buy hardware for a bluetooth remote or other comparable device. We watch various shows (many of the networks will stream episodes of their bigger programs [ or new programs they're trying to get off the ground ] on the same night [perhaps with a slight delay from the actual air-time] ) via the airing networks' sites. There are often commercials (almost always the same 2 or 3 products/services) but all in all we spend less time watching commercials than what we did before and the programs are in great quality (a few - I've noticed - which aren't actually broadcast in HD seem to be higher quality on the web, but that may just be perception and bias playing in).
Not true.
I get a business Cox internet connection to my house...only $70/mo...no caps, I can run servers, static IP and fantastic service on the few times I've had problems or outttages.
I get anywhere from 12-15 down and from 5-9 up speedwise.
And...so I hear...hehehe...you can split off that cable and get full analog channels on tv plus all the HD ones hat aren't encrypted for not 1 cent extra.
Of course...I just hear you can do that.
You don't have to show them a license or anything...just order it and they'll put it in your home and it works great.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I cancelled cable a few months ago and switched over to unlimited local and long distance copper phone along with 6meg dsl for 55$ a month I have two tvs each with a google tv (one Sony one logitech) which are good for streaming news, netflix, youtube and amazon. I also have an inexpensive news group subscription for anything else out there I want to see but could probably get away without it. I don't miss cable at all and I don't miss commercials. I could have setup dedicated media pcs but the google tvs get you about 80-85% there with functionality and usuability that my wife and kids find easy enough to use. Both google tvs have slick remotes(IMHO) and I can stream music and video from my pc via dlna. I save about $100 over what was paying for cable and don't miss the commercials.
The problem is that in most cases, if you ditch cable, the internet price goes up. I have FIOS and I think the price for stand alone internet goes up by almost $30 if you drop cable. Then, savings from dropping cable is not so great. It always seemed obvious to me that this was a monopolistic practice and I'm surprised it's allowed. If I could get high speed internet for the same price with or without cable, I'd drop cable for sure.
Haven't paid for cable for a couple years now. Just hulu/netflix and the occasional redbox works for us.
we didn't have cable(internet, TV) for at least 6 months. The only thing I missed was reliable internet access. I don't care about any of the TV shows that are on any more, and never have cared much for sports. We are strongly considering getting rid of the TV and paying to keep the highest internet speed tier when our 12 months promotional price is up. We will probably have an HDTV by then, and will get something like a Roku or Apple TV and possibly a PS3 for the Bluray functionality, as we do use redbox for most of our movies, as we never go to the theaters. It really helps to not give a shit about sports when you want to cut the cable.
Ditched cable when I moved to a new city, will never go back.
Set up: Ancient Toshiba Satellite laptop (Win XP / XBMC) + 1TB firewire HDD + ATI TVWonder USB HDTV tuner + 802.11N
---[VGA]---> InFocus 4805 Projector
---[Turtle Beach external USB to Optical Sound Card] ---> surround receiver
Software: XBMC for local DVD viewing (all ripped to external HDD), ATI's crap bundled program for live OTA HDTV viewing (SageTV and MythTV are better programs, just didn't want to pay for them :)
Streaming Sources: Netflix, Hulu, ESPN3.com (covers most of the college sports I watch all season long)
Bottlenecks: Most major sports are on either a broadcast network which I can pick up OTA, on ESPN3.com, or some other streaming site (for example, all of March Madness is available streaming from the NCAA, including the championship). Not as set-top-boxy as a something like AppleTV or a Roku, but this rig accomplishes everything the other boxes can and it's essentially built from spare parts!
My projector is pretty old and has a native resolution around 480P, which is ideal for DVD's, Hulu, and the non-HD content on Netflix. The laptop has a bit of trouble choking down true HD content from Netflix, but consistently delivers DVD quality images.
Monthly cost: 9.95$ for Netflix (split between all the roommates, of course)
Hey I've never been a big TV watcher, but I've always had cable up till recently.
Last year I got rid of cable completely, and haven't missed it. I get my world news from RT and AlJazeeraEnglish on YouTube, random movies and TV shows off Netflix, and anything I can't find on those I just hit up TPB, or individual network websites.
I have two ps3's and a pc on a simple network, works just fine. Good luck to you my friend, and remember, F**k Cable! =]
With over-the-air digital giving me the broadcast networks (e.g. ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CW, UPN, PBS, etc.), a home media server in the basement, and a computer attached to each TV (e.g. a Mac mini and a HTPC), I haven't needed or wanted cable in over 2 years. Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, and network websites have me covered for most of the shows I would want to watch on cable. The added bonus is that with some wireless controllers and an emulator, the computers give me another gaming system on a huge display. It's win-win, I get to see all my shows and I don't have pay an arm and a leg.
Don't underestimate HDTV via antenna. I watch all but 3 of the shows I watch on the 5 over the air HDTV channels. Those 5 cover all the big networks here in Canada. Picture quality is equivalent to blu-ray and has glorious 5.1 sound. I also buy (or borrow from the library) TV box sets.
I have an $90 antenna mounted in my attic attached to a Hauppauge WinTV-HD card. Video is then streamed to our 106" display via wired network to the PS3. (Wireless networking doesn't really work for streaming HD.) I use Hauppauge's solution for scheduling recordings, along with Zap2it.com for listings.
I still have basic cable, but only because it comes with my internet and it is never on because the picture is crap. The antenna saves me $75/month in cable fees.
I would kill my cable in a heartbeat if i cold watch most baseball games but without paying MLB even more than cable prices I cant figure out how to do it.
I have used Sage TV for several years I added playon for all the content I can handle. I can play anything including Netflix and Hulu.
6 TB of Data storage. I only have basic cable for recording local channels.
You do have to be willing to put up with a little inconvenience as it is not as smooth as just flipping channels
MTV streams Jersey Shore. If they didn't I would get cable TV....
So I have completely gotten rid of cable/satellite by going the Pirate way (arrr...). I've got a subscription to Usenet, coupled with sabnzbd, Sick Beard, Couch Potato and Media Browser on Windows Media Center. It takes a while to setup and get working, but it's really the best solution I've found. A nice bonus is that there are no commercials...
I cut the cable a few years ago, and it has turned out to be one of the best decisions I've made. I know there's a bit of apprehension about it initially, but if you're like me there's very little you need cable/etc for. Personally, I grew up on TV, but lost interest in it and pretty much abandoned most of it when reality shows took over. For the very few shows I do enjoy, there's always Netflix. It is important to note that I'm the kind of person that won't buy into Hulu because I won't pay for ads. In addition, I have the outlook that it doesn't matter when something "just comes out", but rather, "If I haven't seen it, it's new". If you can take that approach, it really doesn't matter how long it takes for Netflix to get it. This is probably pretty important.
Other than Netflix, and YouTube (for the occasional Top Gear episode or even instructional video on something I find interesting), I will say that the DTV transition is probably the single greatest thing to happen to TV since it was invented. I'm in Los Angeles, so the DTV reception is actually quite great (do some research on the direction to face your antenna/etc and get a decent powered antenna. Scientific or not, I find that putting the tops of the antennas on the wall seem to help as does leaving it completely untouched for long periods of time. That may just be me though.). The ironic thing is that the video I get OTA is better than what I got through TW cable, as they'd add this layer of filtering that would crop the image/etc when viewed on an older 4x3 CRT. When I switched to DTV back then, I got the full widescreen video on the 4x3 CRT, which was refreshing. On todays LCDs, this isn't as much of a concern as the signal is 1080 (not sure if it's progressive or not, but cable isn't anyway). Occasionally a bit of distortion will block it up, but generally there isn't much on TV to watch. The only real reason for DTV is for the basic channels for news/traffic/weather, as everything else can be found online. As for reliability, when you get DTV setup right with the channel you enjoy, it can be reliable. I use it every day as my alarm clock and it has not failed once in 3 years (though cable TV failed many times when the TV would turn on the box would just output a black signal during TW failure periods, which of course, does not wake you up -- unless the sound of the TV powering up does it).
My advice, if you can live without the crap tv, and really just want the few basic channels, spend 100$ (or less) and get a decent amplified antenna, a Netflix subscription and internet access. If your TV doesn't support Netflix natively, buy a bluray player (or Boxee/Roku/etc whatever happens to support Netflix) and use a hardware solution. The benefit of the hardware solutions is the hardware decoders, which tend to make the video look much better than would be done on a HTPC (also a great addition). I've bought several Bluray players for myself and other people solely for the purpose of streaming Netflix.
On the flip side, you'll pretty much be stuck when it comes to sports. Sometimes, just sometimes, the games will be on the basic DTV channels, but usually not. So, for that you'll either need to frequent your favorite restaurant/bar/friends house or simply be not that interested in them. The last Olympics were broadcast, so that's nice, but the average Basketball game is not (though Baseball tends to be). I'm guessing that varies by area.
If not for live sports, I'd've ditched cable (rather, satellite) a long time ago. For American sports, I could subscribe to a streaming package, but those collectively cost a hell of a lot more than a satellite package. Then there are sports that just aren't available online, like Mexican Soccer. Okay, *I'm* not the Mexican soccer fan, but my wife is, and I'd have to steal from popular movies and say, "I'm gonna get fuckin' divorced. No marriage counselling, no trial separation, I'm gonna get fuckin' divorced."
--Jim (me)
And it was disappointing.
- Poor selections from the menus
- Buffering
- Half or more of the TV I wanted woudn't load
- Movie selection was laughable. Seriously flawed, stuff you can't even find at Blockbuster.
- Interface was painful.
So far they haven't asked me to pay for it, but they come to get the Lenovo mini-pc and stuff, and leave me the sucky Cisco DOCSIS3/WLAN modem/router gateway thing that disconnects at will. At least I get the passwords so I can put my file sharing back up.
Overall Coaster did not impress me. But I will start looking at streaming. Now, of my fav shows, what will I find streamed?
>The Event
>Dancing With the Stars
>Fringe
>Firefly
>Fox News
>Food Network (Don't judge me, ok?)
>Days of Our Lives (wife)
And there are more.
Anyways, I'll be looking.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Got rid of cable completely a few months back. Between Netflix and Hulu, I get everything I need except sports. I subscribe to NHL Gamecenter, but blackout restrictions make it a real pain in the ass. Anytime Versus or NBC or NESN has my team on it, it's blacked out and I'm stuck watching a really lousy stream from the UK.
But if sports aren't important for you, cable television isn't worth the money anymore.
I haven't had TV for years. At first, I just switched to an antenna, because I could get major networks in HD, and I felt like cable was making the whole family waste time. (My wife especially, who watched a lot of crappy reality TV, ala Flip That House or the show about little girls in pageants. And now she agrees it was a great thing to do)
So I mostly just didn't watch TV and didn't miss it. I caught heroes on the HD Antenna, which was like $35. Worked great.
Lately, I just pick up things I want on iTunes. Plus you can rip your DVDs (and if you're willing to pay money and break the law, Blu-rays). So a SAN full of your movies on speed dial via appleTV or such is pretty fun.
And then there's Netflix which you can stream from anything from the iPad to a computer.
I have a ZBox running Ubuntu hooked up to my projector, as well as a Wii. I stream Netflix from the Wii and Hulu and iTunes content from the ZBox. I also get DVDs from Netflix, but that's becoming less and less necessary.
I cancelled my satellite a couple months ago because my wife and I decided that we just didn't watch enough TV to justify the cost. We looked around and found that Netflix and hulu plus offered the majority of the shows we wanted to watch. A couple weeks ago I ordered an OTA antenna using the mount where the satellite was for the antenna. This allows us to pick up 6-8 extra channels and have real time access to the local weather with severe weather season approaching. I do miss not having the discovery/history/tcl channel all the time but I make due watching some stuff on the websites and 9 times out of 10 I'm on the computer watching live.twit.tv anyway.
Last October my budget was crashing hard and I had to make some decisions on what to cut to get over the hump. I looked at the $110/month bill and figured, if I spend that same amount of money, I can get me a Roku box, then tell the cable company to cut out the cable TV portion to save over half that. Add just a few bucks to that for the Netflix and Hulu subscriptions, and I was well under the original. Worked great, but the little decoder I got for local broadcast TV didn't work well. So, now that we're over the budget hump and can afford it again, we're getting the cable back in. I just spotted an offer to keep the bill at a lower rate than before, and they'll toss in a DVR. The Roku did work well, though, and if the cable company starts jacking the rates again, they'll lose my business forever.
When you are already paying for internet, its not that hard of a jump. I'm using our cheapest tier of internet and it provides enough speed for netflix and hulu. In our market, basic cable tv is more than basic internet.
I made the switch a year ago and it was a little rough at first. Some of the programming that I would watch before just was not available. While I had to give up some things, I was able to expand my viewing into other things to fill that void. One thing I started to do was search out new series that I had overlooked before. Most of the time when I found something new, I was also able to find the first episode of the first season and watch them all. I did that with a few new things and once I was current, they became my new favorite shows to watch for.
We had moved to using the DVR for everything before we left cable. So not catching things on the night they first aired was not so bad for us. The jump from DVR to on demand was a smooth one.
What's up, Roku employee?
...downloading shows is not stealing in Canada.
You are not allowed to profit from distributing copyrighted works.
I use the cable only for internet access. I use that to stream Netflix for movies. For regular television, I use OTA (over the air) signals from a rooftop antenna. I get about 2 dozen channels, most of them digital HD, and those channels are better than cable quality. I'll be upgrading my antenna soon with a smaller but more efficient one with higher gain, built-in rotator and signal booster, and hope to be able to pull in 3 more large cities instead of just one.
I've saved lots of money on the TV part of my cable bill. I use the cable for phone service also, saving some $$$ also as well as getting features I had to pay extra for to the telephone company. I don't have a cell phone, so I save there also.
We cut the cord 2-3 years ago when DirectTV support gave us fits, and don't miss it much. Ripped the kids DVD's to an old small form factor pc re-purposed as a media server with new hard drive and mild graphics card upgrade. Got a Neflix subscription for movies streaming through that same server. Put up a real antenna to pull in the networks, mainly to follow the local sports teams in gorgeous HD (better than cable). Occasionally rent a DVD from Redbox. The 3-4 times a year a great movie comes out, we go see in in the theater (Hollywood has been on a dry spell lately).
I do miss a few channels, Science, Discovery, History, H&G, and our daughter loved Animal Planet. Notice you can't get these without going to upper tier plans. I'd gladly pay them $20/ month for just those 4, but no way are we ever paying $60+ for a bunch of channels we don't watch again.
Netflix works in Canada and is awesome.
Lots of other options out there for internet service. Comcast provides zero tech innovation. They only repackage what they buy from others, and charge you triple for it.
Netflix + Hulu, occasional TED and similar, scratches the itch.
WD-TV Live, and an eeeBox PC connected via HDMI to a big screen. Used to have a PS3, but don't miss it much since it YLOD'ed on me, and the other devices have its media functions covered.
Dropped expanded cable a couple years ago: saves $40 a month. Netflix gets us movies and TV shows we missed. We use MythTV to record broadcast shows, using an HD Homerun for the tuner. Yes, I did have to build an HTPC, but even that was less than $400. So, I've paid all my hardware expenses a year ago. It's all working great.
MythTV is a little difficult to setup & troubleshoot as a newcomer, but I'm learning.
I would reduce my data plan, but the next option down is 1.5Mb. I'd save 30% a month, but lose 90% of the bandwidth. If my cable company every let me get the data plan *without* having to pay for broadcast cable, I'd switch to an antenna in an instant.
Yep.. As endorsed by Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.. You can't beat that..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Al Jazeera English is what NPR would be like if they had video. Personally, I gave up on televised news a long time ago.
I'm pretty sure no one on Slashdot actually PAYS for old media; We've all likely set up a crappy HTPC for streaming &/or a NAS box for things obtained by "other means".
Stream everything through my PS3 with Playon. I have both Netflix and Amazon Prime.
I went from paying $100+ a month for cable/internet/dvr to under $30 for just high-speed. It took about 2 weeks to get used to not having cable, but now I don't miss it at all. I have an antenna for local stations, but haven't bothered to watch anything other than pbs in the past couple of months.
When you work for your local Cable Company, you usually get a pretty sweet deal on Cable. I was paying 50 bucks to get every single channel available to us. Including the expensive channels (Foreign Language or Porn, etc.) But when you own all the channels, you learn something really important. There is usually nothing good on. As soon as I stopped working for them and I was expected to pay regular prices, I canceled my Cable and I have never looked back. The only channel I sometimes wish I still had was Discovery, but I can live just fine without it.
I setup a fairly inexpensive Desktop computer to exclusively handle all my Media needs. It was about 600 bucks or so, but I easily saved that much money by canceling my cable in less than a year. I leave a wireless Keyboard and Mouse connected and on my coffee table, and I just run whatever I need to run. It also has the added bonus that sometimes there is a call for the Internet in your living room when you have company, and I can easily say I don't think I'll ever go without a media center style PC in my living room again.
This isn't for everyone, but if you fit the demographic it is truly sweet.
I have never really watched television much. BBSs followed by the Internet have been my entertainment for a long time. When I got married we got cable but never really used it. Then came Dattebayo, then Netflix, then redbox, then hulu and crunchyroll and Windows Media Center... I can't think of anything I want to watch that I can't get online cheaper and more easily.
So just last week I bought an ASRock HTPC to replace my aging silent pc build and it is better than any HTPC I could have made myself. Oddly enough I am finally watching TV again. There is more content, available any time I want, in better quality, for less money. I am thinking of buying one for my semi-computer-illiterate mother-in-law because it is so easy to use, and it will pay for itself in about a year of cable TV. I just need to see if she can stream Jeopardy.
Buy one:
ASRock Core 100HT-BD2
ASRock ION330 HT-BD
ASRock HTPC list @ newegg
digital over the air broadcasts and public library. Combine those with internet streaming and you will find plenty to fill the void between going to work. Over the air is free and in my area we have dozens of channels, even an all cartoon kids channel. I even build a DIY coat hanger antenna that I mounted in my attic, which works incredibly well. If you pay taxes, you pay for the public library. Mine has tons of DVDs and even carries Wii, PS3, and other games.
Netflix looks great streamed with my Wii.
Good luck getting your body into athletic shape and finding 20 or so other people who want to play at the same time.
I've got a similar setup. Netflix for streaming obscure stuff, Sickbeard + SABnzbd + Newshosting.com for downloading 720p TV rips, and there's a lovely bar down the road that I hit up when there's live sports I "can't miss". The day I gave up my $100 cable bill and my two TiVos, I wasn't sure how it was going to work out. But honestly, I don't miss it a bit. I watch as much or more TV as before, and don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. Of course, I'm 'stealing' TV from Usenet, but that's a moral decision I can easily live with.
My two year old loves Backyardagains as well. I pretty cool show. On topic: Yep, got rid of cable, use Netflix and Playon Media Player. Got a Roku in the bedroom and a PS3 for the living room. It was funny, when we took our cable boxes back the woman who took them took a look at my son and said "How are you going to live without cable?" My wife just thought "you all really don't have a clue yet, do you..." I'm not a sports fan so the loss of sports doesn't matter to me. I like documentaries, dinosaurs and scary movies, my wife likes drama. We've got all that covered.
I bought a Dell Inspiron Zino HD 410 and hooked it up to my big ol' TV.
Can this solution be made usable even for my 65-year-old relatives who keep cable TV because it's familiar?
I got rid of my TV 4 years ago. I didn't watch much TV anyway, no sports, just news and occasional movies on cable. So now when I feel the need I watch news clips and occasional shows on the computer screen with high speed cable internet. Once in a very long while we'll rent a DVD and watch on the computer. We don't rent downloaded shows. Works fine and definitely saves $$. In LA.
Our cable-TV-free setup:
.nzb files, NewsBin Pro for downloading the actual media files using the .nzb files. Giganews and FIOS go well together, I can download at over 25Mbit/sec 24/7 if I want. Download an hour-long 1 GB 720p Mkv file in about 10 minutes, a 4 GB DVD in a half hour. HD TV shows are uploaded from the East Coast generally before they even air on the West Coast.
1) Very old (30 years) antenna on my roof, attached to my Win 7 Media Center with dual HD tuners. 16 crystal-clear HD channels absolutely free: all the major networks, public broadcasting, several local stations.
2) Frontier FIOS 25/25. Only service we have with Frontier. No monthly caps, no sharing bandwidth with the neighbors.
3) Netflix streaming, some other streaming sites occasionally.
4) Newsgroups: subscription to Giganews, www.binsearch.info for searching and downloading
This setup would be a lot less useful without the newsgroup downloads, I admit.
I've done this. We pay for High-Speed Cable Internet (20MB/s), and that's it. We watch The Office on NBC's website, House M.D on Fox's website, even football is streaming live on various websites! We tried Hulu ($8.99/mo) using our Blue-Ray player so we could watch TV shows from the past (like the Lost series), but it was too choppy... even on the computer - so we discontinued that. Might try NetFlix in the future since you can rent an entire TV show's season on DVD. :-)
But all in all, watching streaming TV is MUCH cheaper than paying for cable/satellite TV. If you have a good/fast internet connection, you're pretty much set - even the commercials are only 1 minute long at the most!
We have a Silicon Dust HD home run for the local off air HD and all the ancillary channels that come with it. Cables basic was all standard def and they left out allot of channels. Add to it that we had a bunch of jeezoid/shopping/jibber jabber crap we didn't want so we dropped it. We use the cable company for the internet connection only, 768K up and 10M down. The cable company, time warner, throttles from what I can tell but it generally doesn't seem to be a problem. We use winblows7 for the player and DVR and music as well as Cyberlink platinum for blue ray/ DVD. Add Netflix for 10.00 a month and you just about got the full package. Looking at Myth to get away from MS and the DRM crap that comes with it. We watch on a Samsung 50" 1080P plasma and the quality is stunning considering the compression levels. All in all I highly recommend it if you can stand to wait for the programs etc.
weixiaozhong
denlu
shangpin
Mac mini w/Elgato EyeTV hybrid and a good old fashioned antenna gives me all the major networks/local programming in HD. iTunes, Hulu, and Netfilx (and a web browser for misc stuff) for everything else. I've added a couple of 1TB hard drives enabling me couch potato access to my entire media library.
I've got two strikes against me before we can truly be free of subscription TV (BellTV satellite service). One, we're in Canada, so we lack much of the "Hulu-type" streaming options. Two, we're on a farm well away from decent bandwidth, stuck with satellite internet service. We do the best we can with torrents downloaded overnight (the FAP doesn't cut in in the middle of the night), Zip.ca DVD rental-by-mail and recently discovered there's quite a lot of true FTA content on the old C-band dish (using an Openbox S9 receiver) and have really gotten into watching the RTV affiliates that way. Emergency! and Magnum PI are far and away better viewing than Survivor and Dancing with the Stars!
So anyway, the BellTV subscription is just the minimum plus sports and threatening to quit made them give us a better rate for the next year.
My setup:
-Over the air antenna ("coat hanger antenna")
-P4 laptop with broken screen, plugged into tv
-Laptop runs Ubuntu Linux with Boxee, XBMC, Enna front-ends plus Prism (or Firefox) to stream network shows that were missed.
(I have an Atom mini-ITX fanless board with 4GB flash drive with Ubuntu I'll switch over to when I get a chance to finish the hardware box)
I also went with an Asterisk server ("PBX in a flash") to handle all my home phone needs.
Media stored on a FreeNAS box.
Also used a Vortexbox setup to listen to my old CDs that had been in storage.
I increased my internet speed and got rid of cable/dish and the phone.
I'm doing something similar without a PC to the TV. I use my xbox360 more for netflix than i do for gaming these days. PS3 is capable of the same if not more.
If you can get pc output to a tv hulu+, netflix instant viewing, and one or two of the other monthly charge services, they will provide you a huge library of content for about $22/month.
You can also use PlayOn or Tversity to gain access to other content which streams from your PC to any DNLA capable devices on your network.
Blueray players are also coming with access to these online services and in my opinion, the quantity and quality of available programming is increasing by the day.
Once hulu/hulu+ are native to the xbox360 and ps3 cable will see a dramatic decrease in subscribers.
Got rabbit ears (same ones you would see in the 1950's). I'm picking up all local channels in Texas in HD. Got an old Pentium4 hooked up to my TV with internet access. I definitely recommend something a little faster than a P4 for on-line video, but it works fine for me. Cable TV can suck it.
I can confirm that Netflix on the PS3 looks far better than my HD cable did.
When I want to see something with the best possible quality, I rent or buy the bluray disc.
Maybe cayenne8 has really great cable and they don't overcompress the streams in order to cram more channels in.
Here before all but 8486 of you.
So "tired of cable fees for high speed internet access", and the solution is to dump the cable provider and stream instead. But how? Don't you need internet access to stream? And cable is the fast stuff out there, I certainly have no ability to stream television over DSL. Unless these people are watching their TV on miniscule iphone screens now, or borrowing wifi from starbucks?
I don't know... Why not use the internet for useful stuff? Why bog it down and drive up the costs for everyone else by downloading stuff you could have gotten faster and more efficiently through other means? If you don't like cable why not just stop watching TV altogether and be done with it for good?
That is what I use, I live in the west coast by the time I get home from work most TV shows are already downloaded plus the nice fellows from usenet remove the commercials for me. As movies goes most is crap but if I see a movie that I like I do go out and buy it. Usenet is like one big NAS
Just to put another example out there.
I haven't paid for internet except on my phone (TMobil myTouch) for the past two years.
I am a barracks Marine. I usually catch an open connection from a neighbor with an open network or pay $10 a month to someone who gets full service.
More recently I tethered my phone at 50k/s and downloaded TV shows or movies, and traded with neighbors via swapping external hard drives for even more media.
I've purchased a few DVDs and BluRays. Some used, others new (Aliens trilogy from AmazonUK, Planet Earth BBC) and rented another couple from a local rental place.
I plan on getting internet and netflix/hulu/streaming services.
I have no desire for cable TV
Of course, I'm 'stealing' TV from Usenet, but that's a moral decision I can easily live with.
And I think that's the point... it's hard to feel bad for big media when we all feel like they are raking us over the coals and have been for as long as we can remember. The only think I'm ever going to be willing to pay for again is an all-I-can-watch buffet of 720p or better streaming content. And it had better be cheap, since it needs to compete with free...
Meh... You get PBS which is really way more interesting than Discovery/History/Science channels have been in ages IMO.
I wouldn't say there's an equivalent experience ATM if you ditch cable unless you're willing to break copyright laws. That being said, I get along just fine with my Roku + Netflix + Plex on my mini. The Roku is mainly for renting movies on Amazon, since iTunes doesn't seem to offer every movie that's available in HD in HD on your non-iPad/AppleTV device which is pretty lame. I was doing a good amount of iTune rentals until I got my mini and noticed most of the stuff was not available in HD on it. Amazon gets my business now. Oh well.
Using the mini as a media center with Plex, I get the Daily Show, Colbert Report, South Park, Khan Academy, NPR, CBS shows, PBS (good documentaries), and a crap ton of other things for free. You can also use it for Netflix (but it doesn't do HD, so I use the Roku for that), Amazon (if you're willing to fiddle with the plugin), and Hulu.
For shows I like on HBO and Showtime (Dexter, True Blood, Hung, etc) I have to download them via torrents to watch them during the current season. Most of the time I just buy the seasons later on iTunes or DVD to say I spent money on them, but I only keep the torrent downloads for watching because the quality is better and there's no DRM. iTunes was doing "season pass" for some shows, and I gladly paid for that. I was only watching two shows at a time then anyway. But since the only way to watch shows as they come on anymore is to shell out for cable service or pirate, well, the choice is easy for me. I find paying a large sum of money every month when I only enjoy maybe 5% of what I get for it annoying.
I have an old laptop I use I turned into a DVR so to speak I use demonoid for torrents and I use uTorrent's nice RSS Downloader feature to automatically download my favorite shows, movies, etc automatically. For on Demand viewing I use http://icefilms.info/ which has over 10,000 tv series from us, uk, and movies etc all in 1 spot that I stream over HDMI to my television. I havent had a cable tv subscription in about 6 years now. Since television nowadays is 70% spam it feels like and news is just propaganda opinion shows anymore, used to the news just reported the facts but none of them do that anymore, every news channel is only opinions and bias, the last vestige of real journalism can only be found in local news markets but those are disappearing fast also. So my routine is I use my nifty little usb wireless remote I use with my laptop to bring up the days headlines from a few different sources. Then I see what the RSS downloader has downloaded for today and watch my shows, and for my on demand stuff example if I feel like watching BSG or old Knight Rider episodes or whatever I load up http://icefilms.info/ and stream it all over my television with my laptop turned all in one media center :)
no way in hell will I pay for spam television or go to a theater that charges the same price as a damn DVD PER Person to watch a movie. My local theater charges $13.50 for a movie ticket and only have 1 theater in a 50 mile radius, so with that plus spam tv you better believe I've cut cable and I have saved thousands of dollars over the last 6 years being 100% pirate with solutions as demonoid / icefilms / and other torrent/stream options.
utorrent RSS downloader... great feature :)
Last year I canceled my cable TV, upgraded to a higher speed tier of cable internet, paid for an xbox live gold membership, got a HD tuner, and now get all of my video entertainment through broadcast TV channels, going to network websites, and using my xbox 360 to watch NetFlix and Zune. I am definitely very happy with the change although I do miss not having access to as much sports programming as well as miss History channel, Discovery Channel, and a few others. I get new movie DVDs sent to me from NetFlix, get to watch the standard network programming, and really enjoy the NetFlix streaming video where I have watched many movies and love that I can get through seasons of TV shows quickly since I don't deal with advertisements.
My favorite benefit of this switch is I have much more control over what I watch compared to flipping through cable channels and I can watch what I choose on my own schedule whenever I want. I do miss having access to more sports coverage but have been impressed with the ESPN channel on my xbox which I have used to watch a few games in HD and it was awesome and I hope they keep expanding the amount of content.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
same here, and you can get a variety of apps for it to stream from your apache server on the local network.
I installed MythTV because the interface is designed to be used with just a few keyboard commands. At first, the goal was to replace a dead TiVo with it, but we quickly realized that we had plenty to watch without capturing TV. So now we just use the streaming features of it, and access DVD images and downloads from a closet server.
Streaming in MythTV is a bit weak on this slightly older setup (about a year old) - the flash player loves to steal input focus, so I have to go over and click to get the remote working again. I'm hoping that irritation is fixed now. Browsing for streaming content isn't so great in the MythTV interface, might as well launch a browser really, you need to use a keyboard to accomplish anything - and the OSK is slow and clumsy. Hulu isn't working on this slightly older Ubuntu, though it is fine in my desktop's 11.04 (probably will update the TV box soon). Netflix actively refuses to work in Linux.
Input devices seem to be a weak point to me if you just want to plug in a random PC. Get yourself a remote that works like a keyboard. Personally, being a nerd, I used a micro-controller (Atmel USB capable AVR) and an IR receiver to fake a USB PC keyboard with my Sony TV remote - so everything (volume, TV power, full MythTV control) is available with one simple remote.
So, fair warning, you'll probably have an all around easier experience by buying a PC remote control and installing Windows Media Center on it, if you can stomach running such a thing.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
I use a W7 pro setup with two dual tuner cards in it. I can watch one show and record three. I can also use my xbox as a media extender to stream live channels to other tv's. I don't pay for cable, but have a standard mount on roof antenna, and I get quite a few HD channels. I do also use hulu plus since it allows streaming in HD in a lot of its content. It is pretty amazing. If you get this many tuners, it does require a pretty speedy storage medium though, and it can tear through space pretty quickly. A nice SSD array would be nice, but three drives in a stripe work well. Since I don't care about backing up the shows, no need to worry about redundancy.
I know why he's watching SDTV... he's got ReplayTV's. Phenomenal interface, features that were years ahead of TiVo, but high prices and the suits over Commercial Advance (skipped the whole break, not just 30 sec at a time) killed them. If ReplayTV had done TiVo Premiere, it would have killed the Scientific Atlanta crapboxes that cable providers give out. I gave away one of my old ReplayTV 3030's (dialup only, 120GB max HDD size, SDTV only) to a younger (=poorer) friend, and he's been using it for nearly two years. How many other tech toys are a decade old and still in daily use?
MTV streams Jersey Shore. If they didn't I would get cable TV....
Is this an ironic statement? You realize you didn't post it anonymously! ;-)
-a.d.-
I'm Erwin Schrodinger and I approve of this message, and I do not approve of this message!
As far as television goes, i pay for basic cable. But with the exception of PBS Videos (documentaries) & a very small amount of news content, it's rare for me to stream anything on a frequent basis.
As far as movies are concerned, to be frank... i am a proud and shameless pirate.
Sitting just below me in my garage is my home server with about 10TB of content (growing everyday), 75% of which i haven't even watched yet, but do actually want to watch it. In a way, [we] are our own Netflix; i help operate a small LAN with two of my neighbors. Collectively, I would estimate our content is beyond 40TB (movies, television series, etc).
I think Dark Nets could reflect the culture of communities in the future.
I love being detached from brainwashing commercials on Netflix, and I find that not being aware of what great new shows I'm missing has reduced my tv viewing stress level., browse, pick a show, click play and relax... so much better this way. I still enjoy the morning news when I'm eating breakfast but that's free over the air.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
I'll be headed that way once my mom passes.
Cable TV is worth (at most) about 40 bucks.
Every time I get it, it slips up from "26.95" to "80 bucks" in a heartbeat.
I have net flix and hulu plus some from specific sites (supernatural- which my DVR had missed from CW). The commercials are brief and well targeted. I watch them-- it's only 30 seconds til the show again.
Seems like less to really watch on cable tv all the time. I am not interested in ghost shows, reality shows, etc.
Been watching Colombo recently. Saw "Night Watch" last week.
Good stuff- entertaining. Cheap.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
what do you use to rip the DVDs? I was going on a trip and tried to use handbrake to put a few DVDs (that I own) onto my laptop, but they didn't seem to come out right...
There's a lot more channels than Hulu+ and Netflix... Amazon Video OnDemand for instance, has most shows available on demand the day after they air. You pay per episode or movie, like cable OnDemand, so it can get expensive, but I've seen all the shows I used to watch on cable and a bunch that I never did. Between those three channels, Pandora when I'm not really watching, ESPN podcasts and an occasional look into the channel store to see what's new, (hoping the discovery channel or history channel put something together to go in there...maybe if enough of us email them asking for it...but anyway) I find I'm pretty satisfied overall, and doubly so every month when my Internet bill comes due, and it's about $100 less than when I had cable TV (and a 'home phone' because all three were cheaper than just two....go figure...). The most expensive Roku box is about $100, HD starts at $80, and the base model $60, all only one time, with the occasional channel fee (like Hulu and Netflix subscriptions) you're still saving enough in the long run to pay amazon $2.00 an episode or so for your favorite shows and still come out on top.
My Time-Warner became Comcast in the big cable swap, but both had the same rule: cable internet home package is $55/mo, with a $10 discount if you have cable TV service. Coincidentally, the not-advertised-but-definitely-available Basic Cable (broadcast stations, Weather Channel, plus the filters never took out Natl Geo or Bravo) was $9.95/mo. I took the free-but-crappy cable. With an old ReplayTV DVR (free lifetime service), it actually gave us plenty to watch at any given time.
Before you take their cheapest advertised plan, be sure to ask (with them or your city govt) whether there is a cheaper unadvertised service plan available. There almost always is.
If they improved the UI, reliability, and had the good content, it would be the ultimate TV experience. The problem is Netflix's accessibility, as $8 / month is not enough for them to get a lot of the good shows.
You still smoke? Huh.
Currently my main computer setup works like this:
Dual headed system with my PCIe GPU driving my main monitor for games. My mobo GPU drives my 2nd monitor.
My 2nd monitor mostly is all about media. But it also gives me the ability to have a 2nd monitor when I need to have a 2nd terminal, editor, website, etc open.
For media I have often open streaming media: JTV and my Orb server mostly. And then of course either VLC/MPC/WMP for video and or audio.
My Orb server sits in my office and has a TV card that can capture the non-encrypted signals that I get from my cable. I am lucky in that my cable offers nearly everything on that line unencrypted. I stupidly thought that was the way it worked across the board when I told my brother in law and sister that they should get a TV card for their computer too.
(My Orb server is not just an Orb server, rather it is my office comp and does very well at that. A low power AMD 4450 that also has my USB backup drive plugged into it.)
Not only did I screw up because the TV card I wanted to get them was out of stock at Newegg and got them a sub standard one that has to feed back the audio via their Audio-In port but Comcast freaking sucks balls in that they only offer the mandated channels unencrypted along with, whoo hoo!, HBO. In short they never use the setup that I got for them which makes me sad but it only was a $20 card so not a big deal but it still pisses me off and Comcast sucks.
In closing I love my live sports. I doubt I will ever want to live without that. But I love my streams too and I really do like my setup currently that gives me the best of both of those worlds. For an end user my setup would be way too much but then again I'm not any normal end user.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Went full streaming nearly a year ago. 1 ea of Wii, Xbox 360, PS3, WD TV Live Plus, and an older Roku connected to various TVs all streaming Netflix, plus a mix of platform specific channels. Hulu and a few others play on the WD TV Live Plus via a Playon server running on a PC. The WD TV Live Plus is really a great device, playing movies and other media shared on networked PCs. Mostly we watch Netflix and have ran up to three simultaneous streams on a 12Mbps Comcast connection. To complete the streaming experience, our Logitech Squeezebox radio is a fabulous Wifi music only streamer- finding local streaming radios stations automatically, playing Pandora, and blending nicely with the decor. The 6 hours of life in the optional battery pack makes it great for portable music outside. Downsides are lack of live sports. Upsides include the reduction in random bored TV watching and queuing Netfix videos from the phone when someone suggests one, instead of trying to remember what they suggested later.
Then it became all Deadliest Catch/Ice Road Truckers/Axe Men with a side of batshit conspiracy.
Without a few lunatics getting pissed off at each other over some trees that probably shouldn't be clear-cut anyway, and without the Knights Templar and the Masons, History Channel would be nothing more than one never-ending commercial for pharmaceuticals.
You must have good cable.
I have Direct TV and the other night could visibly see pixelation from 15' away on my couch of "Cleopatra".
Comcast has overcompressed their signals. It sucks.
So did Dish Network (HD) and Comcast (Digital) before it.
They have compressed it so much HD doesn't matter-- even when you have HD except on the movie stations. Over the air digital antennae produces a clearer HD signal for my local stations.
They are killing the goose.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
People still pay for cable TV?
Even slow 1.5Mb/s DSL works. Cable is weird to see at other places after 3 years without.
The biggest bottleneck is the vendors have passed the equipment cost to the consumer. Instead of sticking to one protocol for a decade, they'll let Joe SixPack finance their own connection.
I have not had cable service in four years and more. I still had a set, but I used it for games and Netflix. News was easy to come by via Radio and internet. Only thing I "kinda" missed was football. This last Christmas, I bought a Blu-Ray player with integrated Wi-Fi, and as I was already a subscriber to Netflix, I had streaming first day. I have a 1000% better experience _commercial_free_ from a combination of Netflix streaming and occasionally buying my own DVD's or BD's from Amazon than I have from a hook-up to the Cable company.
Up until about 6 months ago, I was paying ~$50 per month for cable internet and about $80 per month for DirectTV. I had been a DirectTV subscriber for 10 to 12 years (before that cable TV), and during that time our family watched a lot of TV. About two years ago I noticed that everyone was watching less and less TV, and spending more time on YouTube, etc. At some point, when I asked everyone, it turned out that nobody had watched any actual TV for at least 4 months. I dropped direct TV the next day. Mind you I have two sons, 17 and 20, who spends hours a day watching netflix, playing video games, chatting online, etc. The only thing the TV gets used for now is as a display device for the XBox.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Fellow Canadians, you know you can get a VPN subscription for ~$5/month so you can access Hulu et al. eh? I do this with MLB.tv so I can watch the Blue Jays' games since they're all blacked out nationwide. Everything else I just torrent and stream from my PC to my 360/PS3 using TVersity. Works like a charm. Used to watch stuff exclusively on my PC, but recently upgraded to a 50" plasma and my god there is no going back. I can't stand non-HD content any more. I'm never going back to cable/satellite television, even without the torrents. Hulu doesn't have as much content as I'd like, though. Plus I like to have the complete shows downloaded so I don't have to stream over the internet all the time. There's lots of gamers in the house (myself included), it wouldn't go over very well if I was tying up the bandwidth all the time. I'm just wondering how long until the networks, cable/satellite companies change their business model and start offering à la carte channels and such, lowering their prices, etc.
Why are you paying "thousands" for HDTVs? If I may say, perhaps you are silly if you are buying your TVs around your streaming choices. \.*duh* None of us can tell you why *you* buy "thousands" of dollars or TVs..period. *yeesh* (thousands??????)
nothing silly, political or for sale here. carry on.
When I picked my son up from his rustic summer camp 2 1/2 years ago, his second comment was "Dad, we don't need cable any more." I never had to ask why. He had spent a month in a cabin that didn't even have electric lights, so cable just didn't enter into his consciousness any longer. We still connect to the InnerTubes and stream whatever we want to see. I got a nice pair of rabbit ears and watch some local stations when that is a good choice. Most of all, I don't pay that huge bill any longer.
I also threw in a Netflix subscription for my wife last Channukah. We watch movies, TV series, all kinds of wacky videos and don't miss cable.
Why cable, .. I've been able to stream or use other means to get my tv shows. I haven't had cable for atleast 6 years and miss nothing about it. I get what I want and then im done.
I haven't had cable in a lot of years. Had satellite for a few years (about 10 years ago), but gave it up too. Why? Because I pay a *lot* of cash to watch one or two channels that I like. I could basically pay double that and watch two more channels I like (and whoa get 50 more I couldn't care less about). Ditch the dish, keep the broadband. I watch OTA (antenna) TV. In digital, the quality is better than satellite or cable anyway, and also a few bits streamed over the net, and with the money saved from no cable/satellite, I can get a few dvd's per month. I'm a Linuxy kinda guy so Netflix is out (and if they don't want to offer service, I'm not going to bother with them either). There is a *lot* you can get on the net, and its usually more interesting.
In my experience, you want T1 speed or faster to get decent performance from Netflix without minute-long red screen pauses at awkward breaks in every show.
And it needs to really be that fast, not "we'll sell you 1.5M and then throttle you down to 256K if you download over 750K for more than ten minutes straight. Clearwire was doing that, though they denied it when I called them on it, even after showing them my router's bandwidth charts. I dumped them as soon as FIOS was available in my neighborhood.
When I bought my new house over a year ago. I took the opportunity to go satellite,home phone and cable free. I spent about 200 Dollars for a big ass antenna ( I live in a rural area ). Most people dont realize that when the big digital conversion happened most stations added 2 or 3 more channels. So in my area I have fox, abc, cbs, nbc, the wb, upn , pbs and a couple of local independents. All of which have a couple of added channels. So those give me my local news and weather. Better weather in fact than with cable since on a couple of the added channels the local stations feed their weather radar image. So I can see whats coming weather wise anytime I feel like it. Point is with DSL for netflix, etc and my free over the air I never have nothing to watch. Sports is the only thing that might bother me and my favorite teams were on the major networks for all but one football game this last year. When cable considers ala carte pricing I might consider going back. But probably not.
Six years ago I build an HTPC based on the cheapest parts I could find at the time, except for the dual core CPU. Through several upgrades I have turned it into an attractive, low-power system with 2TB of storage and a blu-ray drive.
I only pay for local channels via Cox, since I cannot get an antenna signal, and that runs through an HD Homerun unit that allows me to record two shows at a time, all in full HD. Any shows that I cannot get via the Homerun I can watch via Hulu desktop, which integrates into Windows Media Center. Netflix provides me with streaming via WMC and, of course, a new blu-ray every couple of days.
Maintenance is pretty minimal, although initial setup does take a bit of know-how, especially when configuring the HD Homerun. Looking at future upgrades, I would one day like to put a CableCard tuner in it to record expanded cable channels, like Cartoon Network and Comedy Central. However, I get plenty of content as is, and I only pay 16 dollars for cable. If I could get a good signal via an antenna, I could run this thing for free.
This system is hooked up to a 26 inch LCD that sits in the second bedroom, which is kind of my office. This HTPC provides me with all of the TV and movies I could ask for. In fact, I am watching Punch Drunk Love via Netflix streaming right now. I love technology.
Good times.
There are so many websites that offer a better documentary package on demand than History or Discovery channel.
Since I got married I've become less and less interested in cable. They show you want they want you to see when they want you to see it. I've never paid for cable in my adult life. Any time it's been available someone else has bought it.
In our house, we stream Hulu, rent from RedBox and sometimes iTunes. If we have a really hard time finding something obscure we've gotten in less legitimate ways, but I'm trying to curb that.
Cable has no appeal to me. Lots of money for a service I mostly wouldn't use. We own a TV and it serves one purpose: We play PS2 lego games on it. It has no other source input aside from the PS2.
The $50/month we pay for internet access serves us just fine for our media...
I'm on my second home-built TV-PC (the first one, bought on black Friday 2003 for $200, was PCI-only, and HDTV out didn't work so well even with an X1300 video card). I run SageTV with dual tuners: an old Hauppauge USB2 encoder with government-paid ($40 before coupon) OTA converter box, and a digital OTA HD receiver card, and Netflix streaming (over DSL) via a 4670 video card into a 720p-capable LCD TV. The living room friendly PC case came with a remote; we also use a wireless keyboard with touchpad. Highly recommended.
Is this really about streaming? Or just alternatives?
I do the following:
1. 1Seg and ChikaDigi (Normal free Digital TV here in Japan).
2. iTunes Downloads. (Not streaming, but.. who cares?)
3. Tsutaya Discas (like Netflix disc rental in the US).
4. Very occasionally FujiTV paid streaming or some free streaming service (like southpartstudios or uStream NHK).
The majority of what I do is #3. I don't see what the big deal about streaming is. Having actual disks/files is much more hassle free. The show doesn't stop in the middle if your internet burps, and you can watch it later on your iPhone/PSP/whatever if it comes in the appropriate format (or you convert it).
Also, the poster mentioned DVR - how is streaming like a DVR?! unless they are recording the streams.
PBS, and updates to systems are my issues.
The only thing I use my TV nowadays for is watching a few shows on PBS like Mystery, Dr. Who (because no licence on Hulu or Boxee for american viewers), other British mystery shows or comedies, and occasionally local news. Basically both PBS and England have not embraced streaming video to this part of America. Bunch of licence crap.
The only other issue I have is that Boxee came out with an amazing product for a computer (desktop), then have not updated it (at least the linux version) because they have focused on their Boxee Box. Still waiting to see if they are going to drop the desktop, or move back.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
I bet your neighbor gets laid ALOT :D
This same issue happens with information. About 10 years ago, I bought some programming magazine every month. I liked it because it "pushed" all sorts of information to me, including new languages, new APIs or libraries I did not know about (sometimes, you even got a tutorial in assembler).
Nowadays with the Internet, I usually have to *look for* (pull) this same info. And as you say, usually you look for stuff that you already know exists. Fortunately, getting the RSS feed for StackOverflow and Programmers.StackExchange allows me to see some interesting things I did not know before.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
The only "TV" I watch is Al-Jazeera online for news, various websites for entertainment and various large-sized flat screens in bars to watch hockey games.
Grammar nazis are to this community what excrements are to gold.
What language is that? It appears to follow the conventions of English, but the words do not make sense.
Did you mean "dispense with"?
There are alternatives to iplayer in the UK. BlinkBox and SeeSaw, both with a mix of free and paid for content.
I was "streaming only" for about 2 and a half years. I supplemented my streaming with AppleTV (the old white one) purchases and Netflix via Wii. While this worked great for most entertainment in the end the convenience factor of having to manage storage for a bunch of shows I would likely never watch again (AppleTV), the lack of live sporting events (primarily college football in my case), and wanted access to premium channel series without resorting to BitTorrent which were coming out (Shameless and Game of Thrones) caused me to revert and get UVerse TV when I went to them for internet about 6 months ago. Living off of streaming only is completely doable I just got tired of some of the inconveniences and decided to pay to get rid of them.
Satellite TV supposedly offers high quality 1080p. Netflix HD still looks worse than youtube 1080p.
I had broadband starting in '99; I lived in a series of rural areas, but it was never a problem.
Five years ago, I met an awesome guy and moved in with him. We're fifteen minutes from a Major college town, and one mile off of a main highway. A little way down the road and we'd have a great connection. Instead, we have nothing.
We used dial-up for a while, but the lines here are bad. And I mean, really bad. So crappy we can't even get Caller ID. (That didn't stop our phone company from trying to double our bill the month we tried to get it.)
We're doing our best with wireless "broadband" from two different companies-- he has one of 'em in his office, I have another here. Mine was supposed to be uncapped, but they changed their minds. His was always capped. We try very, very carefully to stay within our monthly limitations. It's not so much a problem lately, though. Since smartphones have been becoming The Thing, we can barely stay connected. Streaming video is right out, even when we budget for it.
Long story short-- large numbers of folks in the US are completely screwed when it comes to their options, and we're not all so-called hicks tucked off in corners of the south or lost in the middle of the Midwest.
I made a similar switch 1.5 yrs ago, and it's been great.
I used to pay for Comcast "Triple-Play" (phone+CATV+internet), something like $150USD/month.
I dropped the subscription down to just internet access, and bought Ooma (phone over IP, at the time I bought it 100% free, now something like $30USD/year which is still pretty cheap), installed a nice antenna and hooked up a PC to my HDTV set, and subscribed to Netflix. Yeah, I don't get all the channels I used to, but I have more than enough content to keep the family satisfied. I'm saving over $100/month now without any perceived loss of service. Nice!
Ditched cable/dish, now just have Roku with Netflix, Hulu and Amazon-on-demand and a laptop connected to the TV for DVD/HDDVD/BluRay viewing. Saved me a small fortune, and I've started a trend as many friends/colleagues are doing the same.
I've been 90% Netflix streaming for more than a year now. The other 10% is DVD/BD or files streamed from storage elsewhere on my LAN via DLNA. I tried to cancel my TV service from Comcast but they only let you do it via phone. Tomorrow, once I've had enough beers to put up with phone-based customer service from a soulless corporate machine, I am terminating my CATV service forever.
Funny, around here, there is no real streaming option - no Netflix and hulu, but you can watch some shows online after they have been broadcasted and you can stream the public tv, which is freely broadcasted over dvb-t as well. But also, there's no way anyone would pay $100 per month for cable. Tv can be had for about 8.50 (over the air, digital) and probably around €20 for cable/fiber, inckuding the most interesting channels. more if you want extra channels of course.
So, here in the Netherlands, not an option.
We've been streaming since January. Internet + Netflix + Hulu Plus = 45.97 here in Dallas. Neither of us is home very often during prime time TV so the 24 hour delay doesn't have much of an effect. We will probably buy True Blood on Amazon streaming when the next season hits, if it's available.
The other bonus is that with streaming, you don't need gobs of hard drive space to store torrented HD episodes indefinitely. Still waiting on Hulu Plus to offer Hulu Plus Plus without ads (we'd gladly pay $25/mo for this... are you listening?)
moox. for a new generation.
...because all the WiFi channels are saturated. :-(
Even though my apartment is _below ground_ and I get _very poor_ AM/FM radio and cell phone service, I can't get _20 feet_ from my wireless access point.
Running the 'WiFi Analyzer' Android App shows 10 _different_ WiFi networks, and that's _only_ the networks that are broadcasting their ID's!
Here in Alaska there's not a whole lot for "Unlimited" ISP's, even working for one, I can't afford to stream much more than a handful of Standard definition episodes a week. Try roughing it with a standard usage limit of 25GB a MONTH. By the time you pay for an extra usage allowance you may as well subscribe to their cable tv instead. I don't recommend exceeding your usage due to $5 fee per GB over your plans set limit. Just hoping one of these days we get rates competitive to everyone in the real world.
By the way, hulu+ is only worth it if you use some type of PC to connect to your TV, apparently their licensing options restrict the use of any sort of Roku / PS3 type devices from interfacing with most of their content. Check out the movie selections if you give their trial a shot it's pretty sad.
I had subscribed to Dish network for about 7 years until about 6 years ago. That was when I decided to get my first Dish HD receiver. I hooked up my new receiver and upgraded my subscription and a couple of weeks later my service, which I had always faithfully paid was shut off for some unknown reason. When I called to find out what was going on I was told it was because my phone line was not hooked up to my new receiver. I pointed out that I had never had a phone line hooked up to the receiver and that I NEVER watch pay-per-view and they had some gall to shut my paid up service off. I was so disgusted I told them to shut me off permanently and go to hell.
That was a great day!
Netflix works just fine and what I can't get on Netflix I am happy to pay for from Amazon. I like voting with my dollars for what I actually want to watch instead of subsidizing a bunch of crap. I wish Showtime and HBO would get with the program! I am HAPPY to buy your content, but if I can't, I will get my fix some other way!
Yes, I use a PC to watch streaming video from the net or DVDs and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.
Ive been streaming/watching stuff online for the better part of 4 years now.
if its a american show, i just download and watch at my own leasure , if its a british show we have to pay a TV licence anyway so online is free for the BBC. needless to say there is not a single service in the UK worth paying for BskyB is a pile of rush which is normally a month behind on shows from the US or simply dont show it.
Streaming also has a massive advantage you can watch what you want when you want.. or for that service from a provider in the UK you goot pay an extra £10-£20 ontop of your subscription.
... a service called Net TV from Philips in Europe (thus not available in the US) which allows free streaming of advertisement supported catch-up TV. A little like play-on, without the fees I guess. All the broadcaster-owned shows are viewable there, no series or movies. Especially with the latest device I bought (a BluRay BDP5200) it was pretty quick and cheap. For the non-free content, I use DLNA streaming from my PC to the same device, and the set of BluRays/DVDs I bought in the store.
In the UK, "cable" is a Richard Branson fiefdom, whilst Sky belongs to the antichrist Murdoch.
With just the TV licence fee, I've access to whatever is available on Freeview/Freesat. Guess what, I don't watch much TV, but what I DO watch is mainly BBC, which for £145.50 a year is damn cheap.
As for streaming, its too much of a faff.
I've done exactly what you described. Built a PC for ~$300 that streams HD content from news, major network, Hulu, and Netflix through HDMI to TV. This saves me $100+ per month!!!! This same PC also hosts a website and bit torrent traffic to feed my nearly 1 TB of stored video :)
If you have cable, leave it connected as after you cancel your subscription they will still deliver ALL the local HD channels that you would need an antenna for as well as some random cable channels that still bleed through. I still get 58 clear and 10 fuzzy channels!
What you need to stream HD video well:
Windows XP- 2.0 GHz CPU, 512 MiB RAM, and a 256 MiB DirectX 9.0 graphics card (won't give true HD but close enough)
Vista/ Win7- any dual core or better CPU, 1 GiB (try to get 2 GiB) RAM, and a 512 MiB DirectX 10 compatible graphics is strongly
recommended.
A simple TV tuner card can be bought for $40 to allow you to view and record antenna or cable based local HD (QAM decoder needed
for cable HD)
This computer has the minimum of what you need and will work fine for a media or HTPC:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883103297&Tpk=acer%20revo
Pitfalls:
Integrated graphics are OK, but try to avoid anything that doesn't have "native" HDMI.
Avoid the cheaper ATI graphics, especially the 4200 family, as they look good on paper, but supply choppy video (any GeForce with
HDMI should work fine).
You DO NOT need quad-core CPUs, solid state disks, or $100+ GPUs -don't believe anyone who says you do.
Keep the system clean by making sure unwanted programs aren't running in the background and update everything often.
Make sure your tuner has QAM or ClearQAM ability when you buy and trust in the reviews of other buyers.
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=47&name=TV-Tuners-Video-Devices
When in doubt, ask a knowledgeable friend.
Good luck everyone, this is definitely worth it and makes an excellent gift :)
I'll be headed that way once my mom passes.
The alternative to waiting for your mother to die would be to get your own place.
NN
Many college teams offer streaming video online and a few sites allow streaming pro sports. However, sports are best enjoyed with friends anyway. Use your canceled cable as an excuse to go to a friend's house or a local bar. Hell, just give your friend some of the money you're saving and he'll be happy.
Doh, that'll probably cost him more than cable tv.
We ditched and went streaming only with an old desktop I built upgraded with an hdmi graphics card. It works amazingly for most things, movies, tv shows, and the like, but the one thing that we're totally lacking right now is sports, and that's kind of a downer seeing as we're college students and can't usually find places to stream our schools games. On the upside though, if sports aren't your thing, the combo of netflix and other network streaming sites can really do the trick. We just pay now for business class internet, which is costly, but the less of it that goes to an idiotically planned cable tv subscription, the happier I am.
My TV is the most expensive part of my setup, and it's relatively basic (32" Panasonic Viera). I have an HP Slimline, given to me by a friend when they upgraded, hooked up to the PC input. It's just powerful enough for 1080p, though my TV only does up to 720p natively so it's more than enough for now. I have a Logitech wireless keyboard and a Microsoft Mouse Presenter 8000 for input. The default Vista install for the OS was good enough for me, with a combination of WMC with Netflix, XBMC, and Hulu for front ends. My girlfriend supplies her Netflix account, and I get about 60 digital channels via an old-fashioned analog TV antenna in the attic. About 30 of those channels are quality content, and the picture on most of them is stunning. I have sound routed through a JVC 5.1 Dolby Digital setup with a 5-disc DVD player, also donated by my girlfriend.
Apart from the TV, my total cost came to just under $100, most of which was the keyboard and mouse. I do plan to put a digital tuner card in the lone PCI slot so I can start recording my own network TV instead of downloading or fooling with Hulu, and a better video card with HDMI out in the PCI-E slot once I decide to upgrade the TV to a 1080p unit. I would much prefer a current generation Mac mini, of course, but I'm a tightwad and can't justify the extra expense, especially considering all the wasted potential in using such a great little machine for a set top box.
When I cut cable I actually began watching more TV. Because when I cut cable, I got a subscription to Netflix streaming. Suddenly, TV was there on my time without ads. I built myself a media PC from parts I had and a new 1 TB hard disk. Connected to an HDTV via a VGA cable. I ripped every DVD I own. Suddenly, I have my entire DVD collection available to me wherever I want in the house (via XBMC and streaming.) I live in the sticks so antenna reception is spotty, but TiVo seems to have the best antenna receiver I've used. Both my HDTV's seem to have lousy receivers as it is nearly unwatchable on them. TiVo is downright watchable with very little skipping (hell even cable and FiOS skip sometimes.) I also suddenly have much more disposable income.
Everything is fine until your tubes get blocked by phlegm or, even worse, bile.
I bought my TV for gaming and blu-rays etc. I have started using SD streaming from LoveFilm and it's not bad, and my subscription also lets me rent blu-rays and games. If I really like something and think I'll watch it regularly then I'll probably buy it on blu-ray though, since they don't have HD streaming yet.
Likewise I recently switched to a Spotify subscription rather than buying albums. I think (well, I hope) from this point onwards there will always be services for streaming movies and music at a decent quality and price. The bandwidth and quality will only continue to improve, barring a massive thermonuclear world war.. but in that case there are probably more important things to worry about than media streaming.
which is totally what she said
Are we Linux users still out of the loop with NetFlix? I haven't had Windows for quite a while, don't have a game console, and the only Mac I have is an old unused G3, which I assume is unsupported as well. Is there an answer for me, short of buying a game console, a Mac, or Windows?
Free Martian Whores!
Well, you're years behind the curve. Most Alpha Geeks I know (myself included) cut the cable/satellite account long ago (~2004 for me - just got tired of ever rising monthly fees and having my intelligence insulted by the MSM's excuse for News). The thing I discovered was that it was cheaper to buy the shows I actually wanted to watch on iTunes store (~25% of the price) or use Hulu, et al. to get them for "free". I also discovered I really didn't need to watch much TV in the first place. It's largely a wasteland.
How many other tech toys are a decade old and still in daily use?
I'm writing this on a Logitech cordless keyboard that's nearly ten years old, and my "monitor" is a 42 inch Trinitron I bought in 2002. The videi card is almost as old as the TV.
And hey, the hands I'm using to type with are over five decades old!
My favorite tech was installed in 2006, I'll be using that for the rest of my life..
Free Martian Whores!
Awesome thanks, I hadn't seen these guys anywhere. Step in the right direction..
Who need's speling and grammar?
Hope is not lost for UK folks
I have an Apple TV 2, a dd-wrt compatible router, which is able to serve 2 different wifi services in the same house, one connects through my usual Virgin Media connection, the other through a VPN service to the states. The VPN costs 55 euros a year. Netflix costs me $7.99 a month on top of that, (which i pay with Entropay virtual US credit card). The ATV2 also has XBMC which allows me to load iplayer/tvcatchup (i.e. freeview) and hulu.
It took me about a week to figure it all out, but it works great now.
About a year ago, I realized that I could cancel my basic cable subscription, just keeping the internet. Most of the programming cared for before can be downloaded or streamed off the internet.
Dog Whisperer is the only thing I'd miss from NatGeo. Most of the other content is substandard, and I can get better documentaries commercial-free on channels like eqhd, and OasisHD. If I could stream those two channels online, I would drop my Sattelite connection for streaming in a heartbeat... everything else I enjoy watching can be had through streaming. But those two channels are my standbys.... if I'm bored or want to watch something interesting, I will always find it on one of those two channels (and frequently both at the same time)
> I used to love Discovery and the History channel.
You must know a lot about sharks and nazis.
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
To get the bundled price, you do NOT have to plug the land-line in, so you can avoid the telemarketer calls. And with the cable bundle, you do not have to hook up a TV in your house. I get $6 / month in savings by allowing Comcast to pretend I'm a cable subscriber.
Most of the documentaries that Discovery and History do make their way onto Netflix. I found out this last week that the early seasons of 17 Kids / 18 Kids / 19 Kids and Counting and Man v Food is on there. For some stupid reason, around November of last year, I signed another 2 year contract with Dish. If my roommate ever moves out, I'll just pay the cancelation fee and go just OTA broadcast / streaming. Most of what I watch are movie channels and documentaries, and if its a movie I am interested in, chances are I own it on Blu-Ray before the movie channels get it, and if its a show I am interested in, its on Hulu / Netflix / respected-shows-website.
My only recommendation comes with a couple of question first - how many streaming devices will you have, how much of a stickler are you on quality, and does your ISP have a bandwidth cap? I switched over to a 30Mbps connection about 6 months ago, because I am streaming HD stuff from Netflix / Hulu / Vudu, have multiple devices that may be streaming at once, I am an HD snob, and we like being online on the laptops while watching some television shows. So, check the ISPs in your area - I would say that a 10Mbps connection would be the minimal you would want (my old 6Mbps DSL connection barely supported one HD stream on Netflix, and would constantly lower the quality as the DSL just wasn't fast enough).
And check about bandwidth caps. Its not unusual for me to use >300 gigs a month (i have hit 600 once) between streaming, downloads, online gaming (especially if you have OnLive), surfing, tosing HD video back and forth with collegues working on a project, and so forth.
Then get a Roku.
No monthly fees for Roku, just for the premium streaming channels like Netfix or Amazon.
Our house? No cable, just Roku and local broadcast stations.
Tell me about it, in northern Canada where our only real option for broadband and cable is Bell they've been happily milking us dry for years. At the moment I pay $125 a month for a supposed(HA!) 25mbps up, 1 down, and 75 gigs a month with additional bandwidth billed at $10/gig. Given I live with two gamers it's extremely rare for us to pay less than $100 in overage each month, and that assumes none of us watch streaming tv shows or movies. For the record this is the same company that has had a class action lawsuit brought against them for charging cellular costumers for a 911 service that doesn't work in the north. You call it and are told by a recording to call a local emergency center, last I'd heard they were still fighting that lawsuit, heaven forbid they lose $0.75 a costumer, or spend the money properly routing the calls, why worry about another's ambulance arriving in time...
And this boys and girls is why you preview posts before submitting, meant to insert a paragraph break, not bold :P
The most important show to watch is the Red Green Show owing to news about duct tape. http://www.redgreen.com/
To do this, duct tape a DB4 HDTV antenna mounted on a boom stick to the outside of your house so it aims at your PBS station and stay up late.
Yes. My wife and i ditched cable and cancelled our BlockBuster delivery service and now watch only Hulu+. No regrets so far.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Me too.
Reality tv has infested every channel. It sucks.
I subscribe to Comcast Triple-Play. About two months ago I bought a Roku box and now streams Hulu Plus, Netflix and Amazon through it. About a week ago, :(. Will be moving on the Verizon Fios for internet soon.
my Comcast internet connection started choking. Am experiencing drop-outs every couple of minutes. Modem is in upstairs bedroom and becoming a pain in
the tush to climb those stairs to reboot it
When i moved in 2004, my cable company wanted to charge me 75$ for my change of address. Yet, no technician or installation were needed, i moved into an apartment that had all the wiring and setup necessary to connect me just by changing a few settings on their side. So i cancelled it. Today, my TV is only plugged to my DVD player and my PlayStation, i really don't miss it at all. I get to view my show when i want, not when they are aired. I don't have to sit through a multitude of advertisements and I have been saving $30-40/month since i canceled my cable subscription. That was 82 months ago; multiply an average of 35$ per month would mean i saved 2870$ already ! We might not be completely there yet, but i did believe back then, that internet subscriptions could and should cover your all communication services in one. P.S.: i also canceled my land-line phone service and only keep my cellular phone(Prepaid with txt messaging service), i spend less than 10$/month on this phone. And i got all my friends and family to get Skype for long distance calling.
Bought a MAC mini and a DVI+audio --> component out (since I needed to use component cables to get to the TV).
The mini runs Plex, which has screen scraping applications for *many* web sites (Colbert, Daily Show, Vimeo, Hulu, Netflix, among others). Plus it can play ripped media files, and I've ripped all my DVDs so the kids can't misfile them any more.
Plex can also act as a stream server to iPhones and iPads.
That being said, Plex support is just barely OK, and I may end up finishing a shell I was working on to control the thing from an Apple remote. But it isn't bad just using it with a wireless keyboard (Logitech has a great one) for about $70), and using VLC and Safari.
Well, as it happens we use probably half the time before tube the PS3 to stream from our PCs upnpservers. The rest are mostly shows recorded by the cable settop box, watching "live" TV has got to the point where it's the exception.
We probably could survive without the cable settop box, but then it's free (triple play, phone, premium tv and 100mbit internet costs practically the same as 100mbit internet alone (it's something like 69.90 versus 70.00)).
Guess it's even more feasible in the US where services like hulu allow you to watch TV via Internet wholly legally, ...
I put up two antennas pointing at two different markets, I live in between Rochester and Buffalo NY, I get 31 channels, I use two LAVA HD2805 amplified anttenas which have dual outputs, those go to silicon dust network tuners. I use a HTPC on my main TV with Windows Media Center and have XBOX 360's in two other rooms for media center extenders. I archive my recordings on a Windows Home Server. Of course Netflix is available on all of them. I don't care for HULU that much. The few shows I did watch on non network tv I can purchase seasons pretty cheaply through Itunes or Zune Marketplace. In all there are only four shows that I watched on cable channels which comes out to about 90-100 dollars a year just purchasing the seasons. Compared to 85 dollars a month for an HD-DVR it seemed like a no brainer. The HTPC cost $425, the silicon dust dual tuners were $160 Total, and the antennas were $100 total. So for $685 total I have a 4 tuner whole house DVR and the picture quality crushes cable.
Before the transition, we used to get four very scratchy channels. Since the transition, we get nine channel sets (each with anywhere from one to four subchannels), all crystal clear. We just needed to purchase a HD antenna (really, a glorified UHF antenna--you can find plans to make them online).
So, between the antenna and streaming, we have no need for cable or satellite.
We've been using an old laptop for streaming, but will likely buy a Roku box in the next six months, just to have a dedicated appliance for streaming.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
yep, there use to be about 8 good channels out there, now i can think of only 3 worth watching. so we ditched satellite, put up an antennae to get PBS, and we do everything else over the internet. we use a mac mini to watch hulu, netflix, and buy movies off itunes, then on the other tv we have an apple tv to watch netflix, and get our content from the mac mini. works great for us. and far cheaper than we use to spend on satellite.
I haven't had TV for over a year.
My fiction intake: I enjoy movies on Netflix. The Daily Show and Colbert on Hulu.
My non-fiction intake: Documentaries on Netflix (almost all are streamable).
My news intake: I read my news. I find it amazing when I talk with people who get their "news" from TV, it's like we're from a different universe. I find TV news to be essentially fact free.
This wouldn't work if I liked watching sports. My take on sports: "I'm an American, we pay professionals to exercise for us while we watch".
yep, there use to be about 8 good channels out there, now i can think of only 3 worth watching. so we ditched satellite, put up an antennae to get PBS, and we do everything else over the internet. we use a mac mini to watch hulu, netflix, and buy movies off itunes, then on the other tv we have an apple tv to watch netflix, and get our content from the mac mini. works great for us. and far cheaper than we use to spend on satellite. now with airplay, we can stream media from my laptop, or our iPhones and iPads right to the AppleTV also. it all works together so nicely.
I'm currently looking at what looks to be a good deal...samsung 59" plasma...with 3D starter kit for about $1900.
I'm definitely not gonna make hulu or youtube my main viewing source...I want something that makes my investment look good.
Not everyone can only afford a computer to watch tv from you know...some of us like to have something in a room that friends can come over to and enjoy as a social event. Can't do that on a 19" screen.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I built a free HD antenna out of coathangers to get the main networks including some sports, and use hulu+ or itunes for everything else. Most of the hulu and TED watching happen on the iPad, but movies rented through iTunes go HDMI to a 42" TV. I don't know why someone would pay $1200 per year for cable. That's a new car every 10 years!
I guess that's what gets me the most. I really don't like to compromise when it comes to my audio and video. I have always (ever since being a kid/teen) enjoyed good audio and these days good video.
I figure why not get the best I can commercially? Why settle for something just 'decent' ?
There's a reason I don't often go to a movie theater...I can have the same quality experience at home, with an open bar, kitchen...and no screaming kids that people won't keep quiet.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I keep wanting to go Roku, but for the life of me, I can't find a channel lineup that tells me what type of content (i.e. what shows) are on the Roku channels. In fact, this is the FIRST REFERENCE I've seen to ether Democracy Now or Al Jazeera being available via Roku. Pls, can anyone link a resource that gives some kind of detail on what is available via the Roku? The Roku site itself (as far as I can see) is useless for this. It just gives the names of its channels, not what's ON them. :-( [irishdaze(AT)yahoo.com]
-- Dedicated Cthulhu cultist since 1982 A.C.E.
We've been cable free ever since me and my SO left college and moved in together. In the earlier days, before streaming services were what they are today, we had to rely pretty heavily on torrents to get what we wanted. We'd also occasionally visit our friend with the DVR and watch some shows with him on his couch while hanging out (I know, shocking). We watched the first 3 seasons of the Wire like that actually.
Then Netflix intro'd instant streaming to Xbox, and selection was terrible. It was hardly worth it if we weren't already subscribed anyway. But it has continuously improved over time and now makes up I'd say the bulk of what we watch now. The rest of our current viewing we'd get off Hulu (free version) streamed from my laptop to our TV via hdmi cable. There's so much available by those two alone now we haven't needed to download a show in almost 4 years.
There are still plenty of shows that we can't get (till they're available on Netflix disc), but at this point, if it isn't available through Hulu/Netflix instant, then it's not worth it for us to watch. Simple as that.
works for me
I can confirm that Netflix on the PS3 looks far better than my HD cable did.
When I want to see something with the best possible quality, I rent or buy the bluray disc.
Maybe cayenne8 has really great cable and they don't overcompress the streams in order to cram more channels in.
Wow, if your netflix looks better than your digital cable you must have had a real shit cable connection! I have both, and I can tell you my digital cable (espeecially HD now) blows away the netflix picture quality.
It is working very well, willing there is a drawback of quality depending on your speed so if you do not have a particularly fast internet i would not recommend it.
The downside is ads (Or no ads if you are willing to use methods whose legality is questionable...).
We use Netflix and Hulu, which taken together is less than $20 per month. Standard cable rates in my neighborhood go around $65. It was an easy decision. We also canceled our landline and use Google Voice and Sipgate. I'm a football fan, so I stream college ball from ESPN3 or watch NFL games OTA.
Like so many others, I mostly use Netflix and Hulu+. Also Mog for streaming music. I do torrent something occasionally but not that often. But it just so happens that when I moved into my current house and got internet service, they left the cable service on even though I didn't order it. So we basically get standard cable with pass-through local HD channels for free. My dad works in the cable industry and he said this often happens - that the cable companies will just leave it on if you are getting internet service through them.
Go for it. Turn off the cable. Just one thing, if you're a sports fan dont do it. Netflix has a lot of content but is a poor replacement for cable. However, once you break the habit of watching TV then you require less stuff to watch. For us it's not a problem anymore, we just don't watch anywhere near as much TV as we did before. We cut the cable about 1.5 years back. The stress level in my home dropped considerably. Most of the shows on TV just seem to be designed to get you all upset over some trivial thing and or sensationalize some topic. The commercials were the best part. More money spent on them than the actual shows. I don't miss it. NetFlix, Pandora, your own collection of music and DVDs, maybe just turn the damn thing off? Who cares if Netflix gets the movies 28 days after Pay Per View. I am just riding 28 days behind the curve and really don't care.
This aint Daytona and you aint Dale Earnhardt. So stop trying to draft on Interstate 40.
I guess it depends on what shows you actually watch, but we went the rout of an HTPC with tuner cards. It turned out that most of the shows my wife and I watch are either on local channels or available on Netflix, Hulu, or other streaming sources. We were paying $80 a month ($960 a year) for cable, I turned around and spend around $400 on an HTPC. It streams in HD on netflix which looks about the same as our cable did, local HD broadcast recordings look better than cable. Our monthly cost is our Netflix account or maybe a trip or two to Redbox, though we were also already using both when we had cable.
I agree that the cable TV industry as it stands is doomed. Our ISP (AT&T Uverse) is instituting caps next month. They give the usual bandwidth hogs line but it's very obviously to protect their cable TV business. We've already set up our cancellation date and scheduled the install of TWC. It's sad really because when we got AT&T they were (SHOCK!) excellent. They still were until the cap announcement, and we're sad to leave. I'd much rather be giving them my money than TWC, but caps are unacceptable to me personally, especially when being used for anti-competative measures. It's possible we'll be back... if TWC caps we'll be moving to Uverse Business class next. It's expensive but not as expensive as Cable.
Well you bought it, so why don't you tell us why you spent thousands of dollars on a TV (that probably replaced a unit that was working fine)?
I'm not sure why more people don't do this.
As long as companies are tracking Torrent downloads and using the legal system to combat it, many people think it is risky. Most of these shows aren't in the public domain. Who wants a surprise lawsuit some day when they get around to suing downloaders?
Slashdot September 07 2010 - "Pirate Bay Down; Police Raids Across Europe"
"Torrent-tracking site The Pirate Bay is currently unavailable as reports come in of co-ordinated police raids against file sharers across Europe. Police in up to 14 countries carried out raids against suspected file-sharing servers this morning. According to file-sharing news site TorrentFreak, the bulk of police action seems to have taken place in Sweden."
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/09/07/1253244/Pirate-Bay-Down-Police-Raids-Across-Europe
I removed my Directtv subscription 2 months ago and went with the following:
Netflix +1 DVD = $10
Hulu Plus = $8
WD TV Live Plus = $75 x 2 (2 TV's) one time cost
Playon = $80 one time license fee
I haven't looked back. My wife and kids love Playon and its ability to stream content out to the WD TV devices. We all use Netflix streaming on the WD Live's too. As soon as I finish my basement's home theater, I intend on getting a WD Live Hub as well. For a family with a wide variety of TV tastes, cutting the cord was a viable option now and no one misses the old Directtv.
I use Netflix primarily, but my MythTV box picks up everything else over-the-air that Netflix won't carry.
My wife and I figured out that we were paying almost $100 a month to watch about 4 shows on Cable, and we already had a few streaming services like Netflix/Hulu, so this is the change we made:
Got rid of Cable: Savings $100 a month.
Kept Netflix (with bluray) $15 a month, Hulu: $7 a month, Easynews: $14 a month.
We bought two Apple TV's and I installed Sickbeard + SABnzbd (to use with NewsGroups) for the few shows that we wouldn't get with OTA. Added a DLNA server on my linux box to stream to the PS3's The first two months of no Cable paid for the two Apple TV's, the third month paid for a PS3 (for the second TV) with a broken Blu-ray drive since I only needed it for Steaming from the DLNA server.
Since I already had a PS3, X-Box and two Tivo's, I can stream from Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, and MLB, if I choose too, I could also stream from YouTube, Blockbuster, and a few others. With the odd question of "what service has my show", from my wife, it's the only issue we ever run into. We would never go back, and on top of not paying for Cable, my wife and I still get every show we used to watch, just not over the air. I also ended up ripping all of my Blu-Ray's to the DLNA server so I could have any of my movies on any TV I wanted with out ever having to go and get the disk.
...as that's what TFS asks.
My answer:
AppleTV ($99 flat) + Netflix ($13/mo) + Hulu+ ($9/mo).
Considering I'd have Netflix anyway, and will dump Hulu+ for inadequate content, that's cheap and makes upgrading the hardware easy (can upgrade to the latest ATV each year and still save 10 months' cable costs).
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I use over the air (OTA) [haven't used cable TV since the mid 1980s/80s in PA] and can get most of the local stations (too many crappy ones too!) in Los Angeles (L.A.). I have two old HDTV tuner cards (compatible with Linux) in my Windows box. I don't have to worry about lame DRM and copy protections! I also have backup recorders like my VCR, DTV Pal DVR, etc. if needed. Everything else is online. I don't really like to watch streaming videos online due to slowness, caps, and hard to skip around (have to buffer, still prefer doing them locally [try to download if possible and can watch fullscreen videos on my 20" CRT TV from 1996 unlike streaming videos]).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I dumped cable about a year ago. I made a digital antenna http://current.org/ptv/ptv0821make.pdf I live in an urban setting and get about 30 channels. I use 4g wireless to a Cradlepoint router. That is about $25 US a month. Over that I get NetFlix, You Tube and whatever else I want. I have an HP laptop with HDMI out as a DVR and an LG BluRay with wifi. Went from almost $200 U.S. a month for cable to about $40. I get HD Digital TV and like it just fine. I can't imagine gong back. The extra $160 a month would pay for a new DVD box set every month, but I haven't needed one. I just go to the movies more often.
(Revisiting 1982 or was it 84?) 256k of memory out to be enough for anybody
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
I have no idea where you live but $100 for DSL with a max Download speed (I'm assuming is what you're talking about) for 756k, and Cable only being 2Mb? That seems very out of date at least in the States. I pay $29.95 a month for 3Mb d/l speed DSL. For $65 a month I can go to my cable company and get "up to 20Mb d/l" speeds without having to purchase cable television, $15 of which would be for the "Internet Only" service charge. My DSL company just called me a few days ago to tell me that they are now offering 10Mb down for $34.95 a month as it's standard price, no special rate or anything like that. And before anyone asks, no, I don't live in California, Texas or anywhere on the East Coast, I live in one of the worst tech states in the Nation -- Missouri.
My wife and I did not see the reason to pay about $60 for the six channels out of the 150 that we were watching. So we just cut back to high speed internet only with cox in SE VA. I have a decent over the air antenna in the attic that picks up 30 or so digital stations. We have a stand alone tivo and HD Home Run network tv tuner. Between the tivo and window media center we are covered with the local tv stuff. Netflix covers movies as well as occasional renting fron VUDU. We have a pc with HDMI hooked up to the home theater system and we get what we would of gotten on cable from the network web sites or hulu. I miss shows like Storm Chasers and stuff like that on Discovery. But overall we have no regrets and we save money. I did have to fight with Cox in the beginning of our relationship because they were cutting bandwidth to netflix and youtube despite the fact that we had a 20 mb downstream package. That took a month to fight with them about but then someone flipped a switch and we have had no problems after that. We're happy living with out pay television.
I bought a used HP z555 home entertainment PC a few years ago. I changed its video card, DVD player and software. I pretty much watch everything though the computer. I watch movies on XBMC (which is great), and I get all the live tv I want (which is mostly sports) from veetle tv, justin, and ustream. The legality of these few websites is questionable, so it's not the best solution for those with moral issues.
I still keep cable because my girlfriend can use a remote control but not a wireless keyboard.
I gave up cable and built myself a HTPC. I find CBS, NBC, PBS and ABC to provide more than enough TV especially since I have Netflix. In fact, I could probably give up broadcast TV except for PBS. I do miss some documentaries from the History Channel, National Geographic and the various Discovery Channels. More than anything I miss Turner Classic Movies. If TCM was a paid streaming service on the Internet like Hulu+ I would pay for it. I can get old movies from Netflix, but I can't replicate TCM. I would subscribe to cable again if I could get a la carte but I'd probably only want 7-8 channels. I hate having channels I don't want. Comcast's PVR is better than Windows Media Center, but WMC does fine.
And I've also learned patience. It's not all that hard to wait 6-12 months to get the HBO and Showtime series I like on Netflix bluray discs. Sooner or later, most stuff comes to Netflix.
I grabbed an HP MediaCenter desktop on clearance, use Netflix (three disc option w/ streaming), Youtube, Hulu, FreeCast (from Comcast), and a digital receiver for my old 720p CRT based 35" TV. $18/month is all I have paid for years and I think my kids are better for this.
Of course, I am now researching alternate broadband providers since AT&T is about to impose caps in my area. They have lost my cell business and are about to lose all of my remaining business due to their plans.
You know, I think you just identified why I stopped paying the cable company and dropped cable 1.5 years back. They stopped making Firefly. That was a really cool show and for them to drop it just shows their inability to produce watchable entertainment anymore. It was not the only reason we dropped the cable but it was one of the last straws on the camel's back. Burn the land and boil the sea, you can't take the sky from me.
This aint Daytona and you aint Dale Earnhardt. So stop trying to draft on Interstate 40.
Ditched my old Dish service over a year ago. I have a Revo settop machine running Windows 7, with 2 usb tuners attached for OTA TV. With a remote it's easy enough for the kids to use, and Windows 7 shares recorded stuff easily to the Windows 7 desktop in the other room. I have a Blu-Ray player which I mostly use for the streaming Netflix, since Silverlight can't offload to the GPU yet so Netflix is jerky on the Revo. Hulu & Boxee I find too annoying to use, there are too many trailers, incomplete seasons etc. The Media Browser plugin lets me easily watch all the movies I have stored, I can get UK shows from the BBC & Channel 4 using a VPN if I want, Netflix has plenty to watch & I have lots of stuff recorded (Nova, Nature, news) from the OTA antennas. I don't really end up having the time to watch a whole lot of stuff, but it's there if I want it & I'm just paying for the internet connection & Netflix (plus Pandora for listening). I won't be going back to cable or satellite, the few things we miss aren't worth it.
Yeah, and if you can run Netflix on a PC with a decent video card. Say, an ATI Radeon with HDMI right out the back. Run that Monster HDMI cable directly from your PC to the back of a nice Samsung flat screen TV and you got something. Some shows do get a bit pixely. You can see the big blocks of missing action. Like when they show a waretfall. Mostly its plenty good enough to watch. Funny thing, every time I watch the Matrix it never pixel-ates at all. Weird, Huh?
This aint Daytona and you aint Dale Earnhardt. So stop trying to draft on Interstate 40.
I setup a MythTV system that allows me to record 4 shows at once (from over the air channels - NBC,CBS,FOX,ABC,etc.). Getting Myth setup used to be kind of a pain, but the package and drivers have finally arrived to the point that you can have the system up and running within a week or so. A huge plus for this system is that after it records a show, it marks all the commercials so when I go back to watch them the system will autoskip them. Also, I have 2 TB of storage, so I don't have to do the DVR management dance to figure out what to save. Finally, I also have a netflix subscription to subsidize my addiction to movies.
The major downside to this setup is that it does take some tinkering to get everything working right (interfacing with logitech harmony remote, making your homemade antenna...much better than you can buy in the store, etc.). Also, the initial investment for tuner cards + a small system for playback was around 500 bucks. That being said, I have been cableless for over a year and am not looking back.
The only other downside is that I can't watch local sports (legally), but honestly if I really want to see a game I just shoot out to a local bar or something - still way ahead of the game financially.
The Wii isn't suitable. There's no HDMI, and it's limited to 480p. That's not exactly what I'd call "high quality" on my 55" LCD.
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
Yeah home is generally better than the cinema, I just go to the movies as I have a card to see films at a flatrate (which crazily only costs something like 1.5x a normal adult ticket, but you get unlimited cinema for the whole month..). Sometimes the projectors at the cinema aren't perfectly focused so I'd actually be getting a better picture from a blu-ray. For some reason I noticed while watching The Wolfman that the picture was especially good though, I'm guessing it was a "digital projector".
It really depends on the type of content for the quality that I'm prepared to settle for. With action blockbusters and sci-fi type stuff I'll want good quality, but if it's just a sitcom or drama then I'm happy with DVD or SD streaming as these things tend to be more about the plot than the visuals/music. I've even managed to watch some VHS tapes in the last few years and forget that the quality was awful just because I was getting into the story.
which is totally what she said
Slightly untrue, as netflix is directly equivalent to lovefilm which IS available all over Europe, especially the UK where it started. Broadband is easily available without cable and a landline plan from as little as £6.00/m DSL or even £3 p/m mibile dongle. The "fee" you pay does NOT go to the Gov, it goes to the BBC which is a separate organisation. Still never let the facts get in the way of a good rant, eh?
A growing number of streaming sites are starting to verify that a customer is a cable TV subscriber before unlocking most videos.
That sounds completely insane. Are you referring to the streaming sites from the distributors themselves like Comedy Central, etc.? That I might believe would happen.
I'm referring to sites like Fancast, HBO.com, etc.
Netflix is a streaming service and I am sure they would never ever agree to stop streaming if the person was known not to subscribe to regular cable.
But I can think of a lot of distributors who would consider not renewing their licenses to Netflix if the distributors find that too many Netflix subscribers are dropping the cable TV subscription.
Maybe in YOUR area of AR, but in mine I was told flat footed "We sold the Net and VOIP to Sprint for a one time fee" (which is true, if I have a problem I'm put through to a Sprint rep) so we are ONLY getting paid for the cable. If you want JUST the cable TV fine, if you want cable + phone or plus net fine, otherwise we don't sell it period, sorry". I was told I could get business (again with TV included whether I wanted it or not, talking to several SMBs they were told the same) at TRIPLE the price, but again the same TV take it or leave it.
So if you are the western area, around Harrison? YES you can get it sans TV. If you live in the northeast, ala Searcy/Beebe/Cabot? Then NO you can not, as White County cable doesn't allow it. Hell feel free to ask them, their website is here just don't be surprised when you get the same answer.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
SickBeard + SABnzbd. With a 'pay as you go' setup from Astraweb.
Right, but what about those of us who aren't willing to set up an industrial copyright violation machine just to watch our media? What about those of us who are currently paying for your "free" ride?
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
I also ditched satellite and cable (had a free cable subscription for a while with a new house) and don't miss it at all.
I have an antenna to get the local HD channels for local news and network special/shows, and then a couple of Roku boxes for the rest. Even though I could watch the network news over the antenna, Roku has a Newscaster channel that lets me time shift and watch the nightly news much later in the evening.
I use DSL for my internet connection and it worked great for all the streaming content. No cable fees and no satellite fees. And no stupid religious and shopping channels - though Roku is starting to fill out their channel selection with those. I don't add them in so I don't see them or have to block them on the TV.
One other thing about the Roku is it has a huge channel lineup. Music, screensavers, special interest and the like. It has a lot of stuff that simply isn't available through cable or satellite. With Netflix and other movie/TV streaming channels, it's really hard to justify spending even a penny on cable or satellite.
These notes are all from about 6 years of experience doing this with multiple computers, multiple keyboards/mice, and multiple setups. I tried it fairly unsuccessfully for about 3 years before that. I've tried about everything and the above notes are hard won from the 9 years of experience.
I do security
I understand the desire to cut cable tv, but most people in the US don't have a fast enough internet connection for streaming HD content. Most people I know in real life who have tried this notice a huge degradation in their VOIP service while streaming 720p video. I can't imagine what 1080p would do.
I'm a US Citizen living in a foreign country. Forced to watch second run shows or foreign language only shows, I either have to tunnel into the US to watch hulu or sign up for ustvnow (currently purchase this great stream). Have tried to bring boxes for satellite from the US, but need a really bigdish to get the signal or just suffer with no US news. RIAA et. al. officials should be forced to watch all shows in a foreign language they dont understand (at least not well enough to enjoy the shows). Glad I can now finally stream something worth watching. Not all of us can live in the US. -- A second class citizen.
If they're availble in your neck of the woods, check out TekSavvy. Cheaper for more gb/mo. Depending on where you are, you may have a choice between DSL and Cable too. Best of all, you're not supporting the dualopoly as directly (TekSavvy's a wholesaler, so they still have to buy from Bell/Telus/Rogers/Shaw, but since they charge so much less, you're putting less into the cable/telco pocket). I also find their backhaul to be more reliable and faster then Bell/Rogers.
I've been really happy with them.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
I use a mac mini, I've archived all my old DVDs to iTunes, the whole family lives off Netflix from either the Tivo, Xbox or the mini depending on which tv...haven't seen a commercial in 2 years.
yep. Ditched cable about 3 years ago, never looked back. I use Hulu, Netflix and a Roku box. I have never been able to get much with my digital antenna, but it's really only a few times a year I miss live tv. I get my tv news through the news channel on Roku - but mostly I just listen to NPR.
Mostly I just find that I don't watch tv much!
Apple TV $100
Netflix $12 p/m
ISP Internet 20 Down 2 Up $70 p/m
removed cable TV saved $60 p/m
rip DVD's you own to apple TV $0
I save $600 the first year, I make my own stations without ADS!
Downside....netflix is not 100% reliable. Not all shows are on Netflix or Apple TV. Networks obviously fighting distribution rights there. Plenty of other content sources to grab from though. Add PS3 and you have Hulu+. Take away Apple TV and ADD Roku and you add more content.
"all we have is iPlayer, which is a bit of a joke as far as most of its content is concerned"
Would disagree - think it's pretty fantastic...I VPN in from the US specifically for it and 4od....but then I am an expat who needs my Brit TV dose :-)
Yes, I have been using my computer for a DVR since the HDTV transition started. Currently running Ubuntu Linux with MythTV software and a HOME RUN tv tuner, with some viewing of Hulu, Youtube, etc. in Flash. I'm not really pleased with flash performance because of X11 screen tearing, and I can't currently us compiz too solve the tearing, plus it would probably go from tearing to jerky. I wish Flash player could use Linux VX output for smooth video play back. But I love MythTV, works great for brandcast.
National Geographic still runs quite a lot of good stuff.
National Geographic has turned into an endless parade of cop and prison shows (must be the Fox influence on them). Here's hoping they change that soon.
I hate Comcast (thanks to them my HTPC setup cost doubled with the need for CableCARD enabled tuners), but unfortunately I'm stuck with them - its the only way you can watch live sports around here - none of the major sports teams are broadcast OTA (except football, of course).
I suppose one could argue that you could subscribe to MLB.tv, NBA.tv and their ilk. But they're not exactly cheap either, and are rendered pointless by blackout restrictions.
Then again, given the audience, maybe sports aren't that important anyway.
My Approach:
I ditched cable 2 years ago and use my Xbox 360 to stream content from Netflix, and via PlayOn running on another PC in my house I'm able to access Hulu, SpikeTV and a ton of other providers from the Xbox as well. Supposedly MS is going to include Hulu as a native app in the next Xbox update later this spring which should make life easier for a lot of people since you won't need a separate PC running PlayOn.
I'm extremely happy with this setup. The only content I miss out on is live broadcasts -- I've tried OTA antennas but the buildings around me seem to kill the signal.
Bottlenecks:
I will admit that when I first put this setup in my Xbox was connected via WiFi and that caused a few problems, so eventually I spent $60 on a set of powerline network adapters and it cleared up the issues. Later on I put a NAS (Synology DS210j) into the mix so I could download movies etc. and stream them and at that point I also spent about $30 on a gigabit switch to improve performance between the NAS and Xbox.
So in total I've spent:
Xbox 360: $250
NAS (with 2 HDDs): $330
Powerline network adapters: $60
Gig Switch: $30
Netflix: $8.99/mo
Hulu Plus: $7.99/mo
Comcast Internet (15Mb/s package): $45/mo
For about $60/mo I'm definitely not complaining about the content I can access :)
I ditched cable TV a little over a year ago, and I don't miss it one bit. My family uses Netflix streaming ($10/month) for the few TV shows that we want to watch. The only thing left on broadcast TV that I watch is the local news, and I do that mostly out of habit. The only thing on the news worthwhile nowadays is severe weather monitoring and forecasting, and I can get that on the Web (unless the severe weather has knocked out my Internet connection).
And watching someone else play sports is right up there with watching paint dry....
Been a little over 2 years for our house. Were in Canada and so ya not having hulu sucks but it's an easy fix. We picked up a VPN for the american ip an now we have hulu goodness. The VPN runs us $15. We get either stream all our shows via the channel itself or hulu, when possible. Otherwise we use Justin.tv a lot.
The only sports I watch is soccer and in Canada the Setanta-i sub covers a lot, and the MLS matchday live kicks ass.
Also appears important to note that our house includes the wife and kid. No complaints from either.
I'm 28 years old, and I don't think I know anybody who has cable besides my parents. I've never had cable or TV reception, as it is well-known that TV rots your brain. I never watched sports or TV shows, and neither did any of my friends, so I didn't miss it. However, now that I finally got an internet connection from Clearwire I have been streaming movies via Netflix. My girlfriend and I probably watch one or two movies per week, and have just started watching 30 Rock -- it's really funny!
We cut our Dish network off two and a half years ago. We upped our internet speed and subscribed to Netflix with streaming. We watch most shows on Hulu, most movies on Netflix, and have a few digital downloads from iTunes. I have an Xbox 360 in the living room for Netflix. My blu-ray player does Vudu, DLNA content (streamed from my gaming PC in the bedroom) and Pandora for music. My wife watches many of her shows on her iPod touch using Netflix. The kids have a Wii in the toy room that streams Netflix.
I haven't watched broadcast TV in recent memory. Eventually I plan to replace the blu-ray player and Xbox 360 with either a Roku, Apple TV or an upgraded HDTV with built-in streaming capabilities.
So a buddy of mine gave up Cable TV for FOA Digital (We get ~ 30 channels in Omaha, NE, although 1/2 are PBS). Fox, WB, CBS, NBC, ABC, Univision, TeleMundo, MyTV, CoolTV, Universal Sports, and PBS are all readily available. I helped him build an HTPC (total spend ~ $600, needed a new video card and tuner, over the $450 HP) to record these, and otherwise he uses Netflix to receive children's programming and movies.
I cut off satellite about a year ago now and have been very happy. With HD content and 3 receivers I was paying Directv just under $100/mo without any premium services. My current setup is with a media center PC setup in my living room as our primary entertainment and a roku box in the bedroom. I use the NetFlix 1 DVD plan, but use streaming almost exclusively. I was already a member of Amazon Prime so that is basically a bonus. I expect Amazon will expand and get better with time, but there is a lot of content overlap with NetFlix and not nearly as many features, so it's a very distant second. I'm not a huge sports fan, but definitely wanted to be able to get college football/NFL. I have AT&T DSL so I have access to ESPN3 which I've found to be very satisfactory and between that and OTA network television I get enough live sports to keep me happy. The only actual channel I miss is the Science Channel, but so far enough of that type content (National Geographic, NOVA, etc) is available on NetFlix and Amazon to keep me entertained there as well. It's not perfect, but I'm much happier with my current setup than I was with satellite.
'The "Information wants to be free" types' you describe are not actually the ones who use the phrase correctly.
In its original usage and intent the phrase would be better as "information wants to escape", that is it wants to "be free" not so much in price, though of course the escape tends to reduce the marginal price drastically, but in terms of the other internet meme "what has been seen cannot be unseen".
The people you sneer at with your usage do deserve some sneering, IMHO, but only because they have taken up "I want information to cost me nothing" and misapplied it to the original sentiment, thereby diminishing its import. It is very like finding that the KKK has decided to endorse your candidacy, in that it is sensationalist and the fact of the vociferous support can derail your message entirely.
So the things information wants to be free of are DRM and the restriction of motion.
This "want" is of the same caliber as "water want's to find its own level" and "heat wants to dissipate", that is the "wnat" is a natural tendency to seek a state anthropomorphized for the sake of metaphor.
Most people _using_ the phrase understand that the "so I shouldn't have to pay for anything" is a fringe justification; far too many people hearing the phrase do so from the mouths of that fringe.
Sadly the original message has been lost. I try to use "information wants to escape" now because the "be free" part is apparently too subtle to survive its own freedom. 8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I am also frustrated at the picture quality of Internet streaming media. Comparing streaming Internet media to digital cable isn't the best comparision to make; digital cable typically compresses the living daylights out of program material... streaming may look better than digital cable, but it doesn't hold a candle to a Bluray Disc.... why spend the $$ on a high-def TV and then watch no better than standard def streaming material?
Terrestrial broadcast High Def is typically a great picture (from major networks who aren't also compressing the material). Netflix HD is ok, but doesn't come anywhere near the ability of the "HD" display technology from what I have seen. Other streaming media sources don't even come close to Netflix HD, unfortunately.
I ditched my DirecTV subscription several years ago, and we watch broadcast TV, RedBox rental DVD/Bluray, and some streaming media now. We tried out HuluPlus recently, but wasn't thrilled enough by the picture quality of the content or by the occasional hiccups in delivery to my Sony Bluray Disc/Internet streaming media player to subscribe. I think the promise is there, but the data rates for true HD (never mind Bluray) are still problematic for the Internet delivery infrastructure.
Yes, I subscribe to cable, but only for the Broadband and local channels. I could actually give up the locals in preference of off-the-air when Smallville completes its run. I had a Dish subscription for Syfy and Comedy Central. When Syfy cancelled Caprica, and Stargate Universe, I found all the others I liked over at Hulu (Eureka, Warehouse 13, Haven, Sanctuary.) I only watched Comedy Central for South Park, which is available at their web site the following day. (Every episode of South Park is there!)
So many of the premium channels have only one thing I watch; Showtime has Weeds, AMC has Mad Men, HBO has A game of thrones. I can wait for the DVDs.
A long while back, I use to have a C-Band dish. You could go Ala-cart with it cherry picking the channels you want. When those started going digital, they did away with that in favor of packages so I had it ripped out. As I understand it, the requirement for packages by cable and dish isn't so much for the small-audience but "enriching" channels, but due their desire to carry ESPN who's contract requires they provide these huge expensive packages. I don't even watch sports, yet this requirement makes these options more expensive for everyone.
Doing a combo. Dumped Dish Network; bought a Tivo and a digital antenna ($35). Still have Netflix delivered (two at a time) along with streaming because the streaming options are not very satisfying ... as a NY Times reporter put it, "most of their library is from the era of the Carter presidency." Not crazy about the slowness of load on streaming (even bought a new N-router and Tivo N-wireless adapter). Lots of glitches, plus NO SUBTITLES ... c'mon Netflix. Oh, and that "You can stream from Amazon, too!" claim ... not for free you can't. Most movies are in the $4.99 range.
The main intent of the GPLv3, as I understand it, is to prevent tivoization
The intent of the Installation Information provision of GPLv3 is to allow installation of modified free software in a product marketed for home use. If there were no copyright in computer programs, there would be no ban on circumvention of access control or copy control mechanisms surrounding computer programs, and it would be once again lawful to crack devices to replace the software inside.
I cut the cable almost 18 months ago. the event that prompted that decision was the cable company announcing a 30Gb monthly cap on all users. I'm lucky enough to be able to get service from the local DSL provider. 80%+ of the town is not. The cable co. eventually relented and put the cap up to a whole 100Gb instead but by then I wanted nothing to do with it.
I went with an antenna for the networks and Netflix / Hulu for other programming. I also got a VPN account so I can watch UK programs. All this is done via WMC7 on a homebrew PC box hooked up to a 50" plasma.
Anyway, to the point of the post. Apparently the cable company lost a fair few customers over the cap fiasco. also, the publicity over the switch to OTA digital and the free converter boxes didn't help either. How do you get customers back? In a plan so cunning that even Baldrick would never think of it in a 1,000 years, they bought the local CBS affiliate and turned the transmitter power down to 10 watts. Not 10 kW but 10 single watts. The next CBS transmitter is almost 100 miles away, the other side of a range of mountains. Of course, I don't give a crap because i can just stream CSI and the like from cbs.com, but a lot of the people who were using antenna's have gone scurrying back to cable.
In my case, not having kids, Hulu provides what I need free. Unlike those using game systems, I only have a laptop, so an S-Video cable feeds the TV and a USB audio adapter runs to my stereo system.
The only difference from before is I can no longer watch things at double-speed off my PVR (unless I record from the laptop first of course). Double-speed was the best way to watch tennis tournaments, news, and saved a ton of time.
Instead, I've saved about $1000 annually.
Switched from cable (comcast) to DSL (att) last year. I get better performance. Torrents download faster, my home NX server still works fine, I can connect from work. My connection is slower, but it is more reliable in speed. With cable I could download a 70 mb file in afew minutes (usually), but torrents took forever. I could also pull a file from my home server remotely much faster. I am willing to sacrifice the upload and download speed for the other improvements and cost savings, $20 vs $50.
Cheap storage VM.
The only thing on my Time Warner digital cable that's better HD quality than NetFlix are my local channels, because the stations don't over-compress the signal, and I don't think Time Warner touches their feeds. All the other HD channels are still pretty good, but there are far more noticeable compression artifacts than NetFlix.
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
I'm not a sports fan so the loss of sports doesn't matter to me
And if you were, you may still be covered - depending on your cable provider.
I have Time Warner Cable, so I can watch sports via ESPN3.com, and eventually it's supposed to work properly on my Xbox 360.
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
Investment is usually used to describe a purchase that enables one to obtain an income. For instance a rental property or a computer used in a business. A big ass TV can be great fun but unless you operate a bar (and pay royalties for programs shown) it is sort of odd to use the term 'investment' though this misuse is not unusual.
As others in the thread have mentioned: The best thing to do is to build your own DVR out of an obsolete computer and connect it to the TV. With a $40 USB dongle you can connect an ATSC antenna (antennaweb.org) to stream to your hard disk. With some software you can setup your recordings (Beyond TV is what I use, but I think the consumer version is gone now). Connect an RF remote to the PC (Firefly). Get a decent video card for at least MPEG2 decoding (MPEG4/H.264 hardware decoder is better though). Put it together and you're basically good to go. For those shows that you can't record, P2P (EZTV). You'll get everything possible in at least 720P without having to watch commercials. I haven't paid a cable bill in 5 years. 5x$1200/yr = $6000.
No, and I won’t be until it’s 1080p with lossless 7.1 surround, and doesn’t always stop to buffer.
But here is how I roll:
1) I don’t give a flying poo about TV news, it’s so superficial and useless. I turn it on sometimes when BIG things like a tsunami happen (using antenna).
2) I refuse to watch any TV with commercials, because they are disruptive, loud, frenetic and all around awful.
3) I’m an HD snob with way better than 20/20 vision.
4) I’m patient enough to wait for TV shows and films I like to come out on blu-ray via Netflix, though I must avoid spoilers like the plague.
5) I don’t give a flying poo about sports either, so I don’t need any live TV for any reason.
6) I refuse to have commercials if I’m paying for video, so Hulu is out for me.
So my setup is simple:
A nice plasma with Netflix streaming for things that are never going to be in HD anyway, a blu-ray player, and AppleTV for the occasional indulgence in not waiting for the blu-rays to come out (and video podcasts, AirPlay). And of course 7.1 surround. Of course! And I collect some films on blu-ray, but only ones which, after careful consideration, I am sure I would actually watch again.
I get all my news off the nets in word form. I haven’t picked up a newspaper in years, and I only go out to the movies if it’s to hang out with friends.
I use myp2p.eu and streamtorrent to get live sports. I typically don't miss any games that I want to watch. I was in europe during the superbowl this year and watched the game without a hitch.
Been using an Ubuntu/MythTV box to do this for quite some time. Many times I just have Firefox open and browse with a keyboard mouse for news and things like Comedy Central, random YouTube vids, etc. I use a DVI-D --> HDMI adaptor. I tend to just download via BitTorrent anything else I need. I also have SNES/NES/Genesis/Atari emulators, PyKaraoke, and FretsOnFire set up on the same box, along with a handful of other games. The only thing that kept me tied to cable for a while is sports, and I've decided that isn't worth paying so much for; unfortunately the two capture cards I have are now useless. Thankfully, March Madness was completely online for the past two years. The NBA playoffs are a different story though...
I've ditched my satellite television plan in favor of a Roku player and a Popcorn Hour Box. The Roku is for Netflix's Instant Watch ($8.99) and Hulu Plus ($7.99). The PHB is for watching offline stuff, like ripped DVDs, streamed off of my PC in the other room. I considered going the media PC route but I have very little space available in my living room and I cannot stand fan noise. Both the Roku and the PHB are fanless and low power.
I've been more than satisfied with the content available and you can't beat the price. The major downside for me is that when my girlfriend is watching television I can't play ping-sensitive online games, despite using IP ToS tagging and traffic shaping tools to prioritize my game packets.
I've done this. Well, I didn't exactly ditch cable... I just never had it in the first place. I have a good internet connection, and my wife and I are just fine watching all our favorite shows on the internet. For some shows, they don't come up until the next week, so you have to deal with not seeing them until after everyone is done talking about them (I don't mind this, but my wife sometimes is irritated by it).
SIG FAULT: Post index out of bounds.
i plug all my favorite shows into TED (torrent episode downloader), which automatically searches multiple torrent sites for new episodes and downloads them for me. Then, I use SmartRename to automatically move and sort the downloaded files into an appropriate folder structure. Then, XBMC downloads show & episode info and allows me to play them effortlessly.
end result? the world's best DVR. any show i want, usually within a day of airing, a button press away. And I am not limited to shows that stream online via Hulu or their website. I also don't ever have to worry about commercials or "Buffering..." problems.
I cut the tie from the subscription Cable pig 18 months ago. Just use their high speed internet. I bought a used PS3 for the front end and tVersity to stream, Easynews for newsgroup aggregation and I can usually get HBO and SHO stuff pretty quickly (yes, I'd love for them to find a way for me to pay them without going through a cable company), and rabbit ears for local channels. Flipping CBS, NBC, PBS, and ABC is sort of nostalgic...and cool at the same time since it's HD these days. The downside is that I can't surf and see what new shows may be coming up and sometimes hear a long-time later about a cool new show, but then I head to Easynews and usually find it pretty quickly. A 2TB drive and I'm in hog heaven with a great backlog of great movies and can go watch Charlie Sheen's slow decline into a Season 8. Winning!
Investments can also be used to describe a cost reduction. In this case, it may reduce the amount of money the poster spends on other forms of entertainment, or the need to replace the equipment sooner. Both of those would decrease expense. Although, if you've ever taken your family of 4-5 to the movie theater, you know you can easily spend $14 per person on tickets, and $30 on concessions (14x5+30=$120). So a $2000 investment on a TV, if it saves you from going to the movies 17 times over the lifetime of the TV, has saved you money.
Upgraded my Uverse to the maximum offered speed, cancelled my TV service. Most viewing happens through Netflix on the PS3.
If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
I can't tell you how happy I've been since I got rid of my $100/mo cable bill, saving me $6600 over 5.5 years! I've invested that money on better TVs/monitors, computers, and wireless keyboards. I've been a Netflix member since 1999, so already realized that nearly all the movies on the movie channels were things I watched on DVD already. Streaming and using the internet as my DVR ironically meant that I now had more content than I could ever watch, the opposite of what you fear.
The only downside has been sports, which have been slow to catch on. I do plan on paying for the NHL ticket next season, though, which will let me stream all games over the Internet.
The NFL wants you to pay for Dish TV before you can use the Internet. They just don't get it.
Erik
Open Standards Portal
Lol.
Actually we live in the same neighborhood a couple miles apart. Each in our own houses.
Until my dog died a few weeks ago she would come over during the day and feed the dog and watch TV.
She's old and not well-- about to go take her home from the doctor but for now able to keep her own place. She's extremely opposed to the idea of moving into a nursing home so I'm trying to help her prevent that. I've considered one of these "group homes" which only have 3 to 8 seniors but they can kind of keep an eye on each other.
She was fine until a few months ago and I guess she passed some line because things suddenly went downhill fast. Hopefully it is just an acute condition and once we find the reason she will be okay again for a while. But probably less than a decade left. I have less than three decades myself most likely.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I cut the cable over ten years ago. There is nothing on TV worth paying the prices cable/Dish companies ask for. If I were able to choose channels I want, say for $1 or $2 each per month, then I would pick the ten or so channels that actually interest me and stay, but, we all know this will never happen.
I run a small server on my home LAN that is used as a media hub and game server (nothing fancy, dual core, 2GB RAM, WinXP, 6TB HDD space). The biggest cost used to be HDD space but that is relatively cheap today. My media computer connected to my 40" LCD TV via VGA is again a simple dual core, 2GB RAM, nVidia 8800GTs, WinXP rig running no special software. Simply shared folders on drives located on the server and a browser for streaming. I have 6Mb DSL for $35 a month connecting me to the outside world.
My server and TV computer were built from used equipment (total cost for both about $400, or about 4 to 6 months of cable subscription costs). The key is to get a decent video card for the TV computer. The 8800GTs works just fine for all HD (1080) content I have, can download, or stream.
I have an iPad2 as my "remote" for the TV via Splashtop and VNC through wireless. My wife and I both have iPads with this capability. Splahtop is nice because we can each individually stream shows to our iPads via our home computers while the kids watch their shows on either their computers or the 40" TV. The 100Mb LAN in the house easily handles all of this at the same time.
The cost savings from cutting the cable has allowed us over the years to easily afford the toys (iPads) and trips we normally would not be able to take.
I cut the cable probably ten years ago. My approach has evolved a lot since then, but now relies on subsonic as the server and sickbeard+usenet for aggregating shows. I can watch on any platform including my Android phone. It's beautiful.
I would gladly pay a reasonable price for a comparable service, but none exist. I'd rather watch shows and get on with my life than try to navigate what shows I can and can't watch on Hulu vs. Hulu+ trying to find legitimate stream for things not on Netflix, etc.
or else!
as the cable rates were scheduled to go up soon and, owing to the general corporate climate of screwing their employees (read- no recent for 3 years), we decided to cut the cable on the entertainment and home phone. for entertainment, streaming from various sites, a tuner card in a media PC which just DVR's and we can watch at will the specific shows we want and i've also ripped my DVD collection to a bunch of AVI's that are on a server (no more kids killing the actual media). the kids have learned to navigate the directory structures from their PC and the home media PC (got o PS3 that does streaming from the server also). this also gave me the ability to segregate, by login, who has access to what media (my wife thought it would not be the best move if my kids were watching anything much beyond Disney-type stuff). i set up a separate media share for the MP3 collection and now everybody's device can get to the collection. and all the above is running on WiFi-G (might be cabling later or up-ing to an N network).
for telco, we stayed with cell phones and Skype-pc connections.
so, head-end is a decent PC with a bunch of shares on it, wireless network and any device connected to it. wife told me that she doesn't miss the old way.
= one happy me.
I have been researching this now for several years. That how to make due without Cable TV and the Difference in Internet vs. Cable for TV viewing.
There are a few things there the Live streaming channels are really missed.
So I have created a site to reproduce these.
http://www.videotechnology.com/tv/ It's mostly news for now. I will be adding sports and music next.
I also have started http://utvii.com/ but this is still under works.
At http://www.videotechnology.com/ I am also writing articles on this subject for my main web site.
I have a business plan for delivering full cable TV over the Internet right now that I am still finishing up and have some people interested in funding.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Did this about two years ago. After experimenting with different things on my laptop I finally went with a MacMini. Just works and my wife can operate it without much trouble. Did a BlueTooth keyboard and mouse for couch operation. EyeTV with the USB digital tuner and a cheap $30 antenna in the attic for off-air. Tried live streaming of sports as that was a requirement from my better half and found the NFL offerings were weak at best at any price. Only option was hundreds of $ to DirectTV which seems to have a lock on streaming NFL inside the US. Off air worked quite well and with a great picture. So with the eyeTV software we have DVR which picks up all the kids shows, building a nice library or Dinosaur Train and Thomas the Train. We paid the couple $ a year for the TVGuide EPG data downloaded daily. We don't watch a lot of movies and those we do we tend to have on DVD. I threw an external Firewire drive on there for plenty of room and ripped our library to it over time. Probably upgrade to a Drobo when the current drive fills up. Not irreplaceable data but I also don't want to re-build that library again. The one bit that I especially liked was the optical outputs, available on most (all?) Macs in their headphone jack. I was able to run that right into my home theatre system to get the 5.1 decode both from DVD and broadcast. Also, as a real computer and not some simplified TV box, I've got full app usefulness. So I'm bringing up the kids right with MacMAME and classic arcade games along with a few other titles. We also can web surf or whatever else is needed as it just connects to my wireless network. We've also populated iTunes with most of our music library so it makes a nice jukebox with the visualizer running. The box is otherwise silent and unobtrusive. Still have the old sony trinitron so doing a VGA to NTSC SVideo downconvert for now. Found a nice little USB powered device to do that for $30. I'm allowed to go to an HD projector with screen once I finish the bathroom remodel :) I hauled the setup to another venue for a projected high-def superbowl party (clamped the antenna to a railing outside) and it worked really well.
I've got 7 Mbps DSL; that's too slow for decent-quality streaming, even if I totally dedicated all my bandwidth to it (but that itself would be pretty impractical). Even youtube sometimes has to be paused to let it buffer. Ten years from now the situation might be different, and I know some people already have much faster connections today, to apparently much faster servers than whatever youtube is using (?), but for me, streaming is a silly idea right now.
There's also the big problem (again, this might be a short-term thing) of availability. Hulu, Netflix, etc have a lot of stuff, but it's rare for them to have whatever you happen to want. Part of the point of firing the cable company is saying No to the idea of, "We'll decide what you watch." (The other part being, "We'll decide when you watch it, and what you watch it on.", i.e. their position on letting HDHomeRuns or similar equipment catch the stream. They don't want my money? Ok, fine.) Hulu is no better. Netflix does look better, but to a pretty disappointing degree.
Basically, streaming is still very much an infant industry. Maybe it works for some people. Not me.
So the 2011 solution is downloading. You get whatever you want to watch, and at whatever quality you need to fill your girlfriend's $1500 screen, without any regard for your total bandwidth or transient internet conditions. That, supplemented with MythTV for local OTA TV stations, and our lives are successfully wasted staring at the screen, night after night. And if that last part sounded a bit bittersweet, yeah .. it's a little too good, for our own good.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
All I've done is connected my laptop to an HD big screen an extended my desktop. I use Hulu, Netflix, ESPN3, & other sites to watch content and my bill is s$30 for the internet & $12 for Netflix. Hulu and the other sites pay their royalties through the ads I have to watch online. I have noticed that streaming ads are catching up to standard cable. A year or two ago, I could watch a show without any commercials or a single 30 sec spot, now Hulu and others are dragging the ad rotators longer and longer. That's how they get paid.
Really? It sounds more like two different choices for how to consume. Either option is probably enjoyable in its own way but both are consumption rather than investment. We all consume and sometimes invest. Calling the purchase of a multi thousand dollar TV an investment just seems a daft use of the word.
Don't forget that Netflix recently changed the default resolution to a lower grade to save customers bandwidth. Login to their website and make sure your resolution is set to the highest quality.
Using a word as it is defined isn't daft. Perhaps a refresher of what the word means, from the dictionary:
Investment: a devoting, using, or giving of time, talent, emotional energy, etc., as for a purpose or to achieve something
If your goal is to reduce costs, then devoting (money/time/effort) to achieve that is an investment.
I had previously tried a USB tuner with a crappy antenna - it marginally worked but could sometimes skip during broadcast TV so I gave it up. Then I read about a pre-amplifier that sits between the antenna and tuner - now it's fine. I use a Win7 machine, AVerMedia USB tuner, Winegard AP8700 pre-amplifier, an RCA ANT1500 Superior Flat Antenna and Windows Media Center. I use Hulu (not plus), ESPN360 and Netflix (I share this with someone else so it is half-price.) I have also subscribed to mlb.com but they recently blacked out all local teams, even on the road, so until I get a service that masks IP I've stopped - another example of me wanting to pay but they won't take my money.
"...all we have is iPlayer, which is a bit of a joke as far as most of its content is concerned..." What? The BBC produce top quality stuff.
Econ 101: there is consumption and investment. Buying a TV set whether it is $100 or $5,000 is consumption. Calling it an investment: priceless.
Have you looked at the (free) USB Media Channel? This allows you to play audio and video files from a USB device plugged into the back of the Roku. You can also use it to show photographs.
The interface is a little bare bones, but it works well for me. Plays ripped DVD content and legally downloaded videos. The combination of streaming and local files in a $99 box is near perfect.
The first thing you need to do is adjust what sort of entertainment and information you need. I live in a rural area without good TV reception or local internet news. This brings back the newspaper for all my local news.
I have a PS3, an Xbox 360, a Wii, and two computers: a PC and a MacBook pro. My wife and I have adjusted nicely using Netflix and streaming content to rid ourselves of cable or satellite. Between streaming content we also use video games and books for entertainment. Sports broadcasts aren't an issue as nether of us are huge fans. If we get a bug to watch a game, we go to a sports bar or the like.
There are some drawbacks, however. Fees for Netflix, Hulu, and various video and computer games, while not as great as cable, do make a dent. There is also a time factor. Without resorting to piracy, I have to wait and wait in order to watch some of my favorite shows. This rids some superficial "water cooler" type conversation with people, and it tries my patience.
There is another issue as well, and it can be a pro or a con depending on how you feel. I can't just sit and veg and flip through channels. If I want to watch something I have to make a conscious decision to do so. While this gives you a lot of free time in your free time it also can be frustrating if you don't want to think about anything.
The most basic thing to know is that your entertainment will be a lot more active rather than passive. It takes some getting use to, but now I prefer it.
The other thing to watch for is the sanctimonious attitude you may develop. Actively looking for entertainment makes you realize how stupid most tv really is. When that realization comes, it's hard not to push it on others. You become like a TV vegan who can't believe anyone would PAY for CRAP when all you need is RIGHT THERE. You don't want to be a dick so you have to watch yourself.
We are streaming only. I must admit that most of the shows we watch, however, are not available on hulu where we live, so most of the content we watch in our house is illegal. Ditched cable about five years ago when I found out about torrents, and switched to streaming only about two years ago when the shows we like in our house all became available. Honestly, if you find the right sites, there's not much you can't find. Even old/obscure shows pop up often, so content-wise, it's basically the same as having cable or a dish. If you're going this way, though, make sure to install adblock plus, as pirate tv sites are FILLED with flash ads. However, I would gladly watch all these shows with commercials legally, except for: 1. Most shows are not available in my area legally 2. When they are, the players from local tv stations usually don't work as well (crash more, etc.) as the pirate sites 3. Even when the shows we want to watch are available, and the player isn't buggy (vis-a-vis most discovery and tlc shows), it's just more convenient to stick with the pirate sites, as we can access ALL the content we want through one search portal. It would be a waste of my time to switch to the legal sites, especially as the law here currently doesn't forbid consumers from accessing pirate material, only providers can't provide illegal stuff. If they had a free, ad supported version of "freevideosforwatching.com*" (*name changed) AND it was illegal for me to watch the pirated ones, I wouldn't hesitate to switch for a second.
IIRC the number was 640k and it was Bill G who said it.
I do very little streaming. Perhaps I'll stream something on my laptop from a free service while gaming on my desktop but I do not subscribe to any services. I stream maybe once every several months and rent at about the same level. The local library can typically cover my needs for free. Thus, I'm really not a good candidate for something involving a monthly fee.
I'd rather have the physical media to do with as I please. UVVU looks to address this, allowing you to stream purchased content from anywhere while also allowing physical and digital copies. If UVVU is planned and executed well, that would cover my needs pretty well. I can have a physical copy for home, digital copies on computers and tab/phone devices, and I can stream if I'm elsewhere. Of course, this is Hollywood so it may well be a damned mess.
Copyright is immoral and absurd, you have an obligation to break immoral laws. It's not just a matter of getting things for free, it's a higher calling to the greatest of causes. Those in power who want the old slave system to be perpetuated can only hope that enough people stop violating their illegitimate rules that they are able to pick of the few who remain. There is strength in numbers, and eventually the cultural pressure will force a change and the monied interests will be left weeping on the side of the road of progress.
I second this. TekSavvy is a dream of an ISP. When I lived in Southern Ontario, I eventually broke free of Bell and found TekSavvy. When I first got service from them, I called them about difficulties getting my connection set up. I got through to someone right away. There was no waiting on hold, and the fellow I spoke with was a competent tech. He wasn't reading from a script, he was helping me get my connection up. If they ever expand their service into the maritimes, I'll jump ship from my current ISP overnight.
when I moved out to live on my own 4 years ago, I decided I didn't want to pay a monthly fee to sit and watch commercials for 20 minutes out of the hour. I only pay for cable internet, but no cable tv, and no longer rent a dvr. hulu and other free online services are slowly getting out of hand with commercials now too, but are still much better then cable. I use an old pentium 4 computer with a dvi to hdmi adapter to hook up to a projector. I would love to buy a small linux based media center to replace this computer, but I haven't been able to find what I want yet. aside from flash issues and monthly bandwidth limits, I'm happy with streaming my media. my internet provider has a peak time bandwidth limit of 50gb per month, which is way to low and behind the times. I often use more then double that limit, but thankfully they haven't been complaining about it the past few years, but they used to. I believe much of the media industries have fallen behind the times and need to ketch up with the technology available. I also stopped buying cd's long ago. I use mp3's in every music device I have any more, so why would I buy an analog media?
I got rid of DirectTV last year in the beginning of Feb and switched to Netflix, viewed mostly on my Xbox 360. I don't see myself going back anytime soon. The ESPN app added to the 360 cemented that, as the only thing I was missing were non-network broadcast games. I haven't tried Hulu Premium because I don't see myself paying for a service that also has ads.
There is already a ton of content available and more coming every day. One of Netflix's best moves was getting itself onto gaming consoles, because it allowed them to provide their service to millions of houses of people that aren't tech savvy enough to build a home theater computer.
This is not true for me. I get Cox cable internet only. No cable TV at all. Cox service has been excellent. I view all cable companies as evil, but Cox for me at least is less evil than the others. I have a HD Tivo unit with slingbox which I use to access a Tivo remotely including most recently using an iPad2 with the new slingbox client for my wife who uses it on a treadmill in another room. I also have a Roku box in another room. We have netflix and use the free Hulu and sometimes Amazon video on demand. We will stream a lot to our iMac's, iPhone's and my daughter's iPhone touch. Works great.
I switched to Apple TV from Cable as my only source of TV entertainment, though I can't stream live news I find that my consumption of news is exclusively on my laptop anyway. I currently have a 20mb connection through my cable provider but no television service, I have an 8 and 20 year old and home and my wife and I watch several shows both through itunes and netflix, none of us has missed cable service in the ~10 months since we cut the cord. its an easy try as the device paid for itself in the first month of use, though you will want to take into account how much you would be spending on netflix and itunes, netflix is cheap and itunes is not a montly bill to be worried about, we can decide on the spot if we want to drop $60 on a subscription to an entire series which ends up being way better than dvr, new episodes just show up and you can filter by unwatched, its effortless. Plus with itunes you have to download the movie or show before watching (no streaming) this was listed as a detriment but yesterday when i had an internet connection outage, i switched to the sea of shows stored on my computer and had hours of entertainment i would not have had with cable as it would have been 'down' as well.
Check out Nowhere TV channel for both of those though I think DN has their own channel now...
Google for something like Roku private channel list and you will find sites like this.
The two are not mutually exclusive, but you would know that from your Econ 101 class, had you attended it.
I so wanted to let you have your last word, whatever it might have been. But this is too stupid. Yes, I did attend both micro and macro economics classes. But just from a standpoint of simple logic consider the argument you put forward earlier. The person "saves" money because as the head of a family of five (I also have three children so this isn't entirely hypothetical) he purchases a $2,000 TV because it costs less than 17 trips to the movies. This would seem to imply that if he chose to go to the movies 16 times rather than purchase a TV for a comparable cost that those trips to the movies constitutes an investment. That is so stupid it makes fun of itself.
Not exactly. In that case, you no longer have a tangible object to make an investment into. Nor have you really devoted anything. You've refrained from devoting/using/giving, which isn't the same thing.
Examples:
Bloomberg: "Maximizing Your College Investment" - Do you consider college a consumption, and therefore unable to be also an investment?
If you were a farmer, if it costs you $2000 a day in labor to mow/cut/mulch your land, would buying a $10000 piece of machinery not be an investment if it lowered your daily labor cost to $1000, or is that also just consumption?
As an ex-pat Brit living in Austria, I have had to be a bit creative, but here is what I now use:
I have a PC with HDMI to a TV. I subscribe to a great service called 'Identity Cloaker' which includes a VPN subscription at about $10/month. This has servers in lots of places including the US and UK, so depending on what I want to watch, I hop on to the US servers (for Hulu) or UK servers (for BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, 4OD, Demand 5 or whatever).
I used to use a plug-in for Windows Media Center called Milliesoft MCE, but this hasn't been working as well for me lately, so I may go back to XBMC, but mostly I just use my browser and stream content that way.
I still use disks and iTunes for some stuff as the local Wi-Fi and Telecoms can be a bit variable in speed at peak times.
My one big frustration is in subscription services. Even though I would be happy to pay, without either a US or UK mailing address, I cannot sign up for these - even though I still operate a UK bank account. I get forced to local language (Austrian or German) online stores where a) everything is advertised in German with no English options b) there is only a small amount of content compared to what is available in the equivalent UK or US online stores.
I can understand why Tesco won't deliver my groceries, but why can iTunes not let me choose the same movies, songs etc. that I can find in other parts of the EU?
We use a Roku, and a Tivo to get all our programming off the net. We use Netflix and Amazon mostly. We sometimes rent a dvd...and hardly ever go to the theater anymore. Too damn expensive. The wife and kids have no trouble with it either, and enjoy not having the advertisements.
"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
Don't forget attaching an antenna to your DVR to watch or record digital broadcasts of local channels. Since the conversion to digital over the air, the old-fashioned broadcast quality is just as good as, or better than, cable. I've used Microsoft Media Center to record HD broadcasts to a Dell Inspiron Zino with HDMI output - zero cost for the free broadcast signals. You can do this for an investment of $50 - 100 for the Hauppauge tuner and antenna. I'm thinking of putting a central antenna back on the house, probably ditched long ago when previous owners switch to cable, and then using the installed cable connections to distribute the signal to all the rooms. Haven't done this yet, and haven't ditched basic Comcast cable, but plan to at some point. Will likely combine with a Nexflix subscription, maybe Roku, etc.
I'm not super into having cable, but I have a two kids, ages six and two. While there is a lot of kids content out there on Netflix, it isn't infinite. I guess an HD antenna will bring in pubic television, but what am I supposed to do, hook up a VCR and tape Sesame Street? The whole Nickelodeon gamut on Verizon here is about ten channels, everything from real little kid fare to tween shows. I feel like I'm stuck for another ten years or so. Anyone have any ideas?