Slashdot Mirror
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.
If you don't watch sports you're fine. If you do then unfortunately ditching cable just isn't a good option yet.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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"
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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'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
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.
Moonlight?
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.
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....
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Netflix does not work with Moonlight at this time. While Moonlight supports all of the UI and media playback infrastructure, it lacks DRM support which Netflix requires.
- Moonlight - Frequenctly Asked Questions
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
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 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.
I have something similar set up. Netflix and Hulu. I've got MythTV hooked up to an antenna to record OTA stuff which gets us all the major channels and allows us to record things, and a PS3 for Netflix streaming. We also have some desktops for gaming and such, so I just run PlayOn which lets us stream video from any major online site to the TV through the PS3. It works pretty well.
And of course all of our Blu-Rays and DVDs are ripped to a 3TB array in the MythTV box, so we don't have to hunt through tons of discs (or risk them being scratched or broken by our 2 year old and 9 month old children), and we can watch anything at any time.
The downside is that it takes a bit of monkeying around to get everything working on MythTV. But it's pretty solid once you do.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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)
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.
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.........
When you can watch what you want on demand on the web?
You falsely presume that everything is on the web.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
What's up, Roku employee?
1) 2G is pretty lame for a ZFS box. Seriously. Get more, now. Read some info on ZFS to know why.
and 2) this discussion wasn't about storage, where do you get your stuff from anyway? Oh yes, torrents, of course. Streaming sites dont need shitloads of terabytes.
...downloading shows is not stealing in Canada.
You are not allowed to profit from distributing copyrighted works.
Besides, the stuff that's on the web tends to have annoying randomly placed unskippable commercials.
At least old school commercials are placed in natural breaks in the action put there by writers expecting those breaks to be there.
For the most part, "Streaming" basically means either Pay-Per-View or 80s style commercials. There are a few flat rate services out there but they all have very little to offer. If there is something in particular you want to see, you're probably still better off with the medium that has the lion's share of stuff (namely cable).
A good PVR helps make cable a lot more bearable. If you don't have a good PVR, I could certainly see where you might get the false impression that current streaming TV options are better than they really are.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
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
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".
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.
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?
Besides, the stuff that's on the web tends to have annoying randomly placed unskippable commercials.
Actually, my Spousal Unit doesn't mind the commercials while watching /Desperate Housewives/ on abc.com because they are so short.
(I'd probably disagree, but mainly since you can't pause them.)
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The cable providers are too busy adding caps and figuring out how to stop streaming to spend time on that one.
You are right, though.
The spiffy thing about netflix streaming is that nearly everything you buy for the entertainment center has the ability to play that it seems.
PS3, Wii, Bluray players, AppleTV, some televisions.. almost to the point of getting a complimentary Netflix streaming client in new toasters, nowadays.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
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.
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?
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'
...and conversely, I'm currently seeding some shows that are pretty unusual and definitely no longer on the air or available on disc.
Damn those pesky terrorists
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.
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!
"Gotten" comes from the word "get" - To receive/bring/come into the possession of something concrete or abstract. In this form, it means the 'possessions previously acquired'. You will find this word used in other phrases like "ill gotten" and "gotten lost" according to the Princeton WordNet.
In this case, the phrase means that the possessions previously acquired in question have been rid of.
Seemed easy enough to me?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Fortunately, I can have cable TV *and* an Internet connection.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
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
Here in the UK (and I don't believe you even need a TV license for the non-live stuff) - I have a decent ADSL connection (no, not a £2.00 a month Tiscalli line with more latency and contention ratio than you can waggle a stick at) and a couple of PS3s. They output iPlayer HD to a couple of decent sized TVs, wirelessly, perfectly.
They also play Bluray (combined with a cheap LoveFilm subscription - which iPlayer also supports the online viewing of) and all of ITV/4oD/Five's online offerings too.
Of course beside all this, if you're going to pay your £120 a year TV license, I'm also legally entitled to both Freeview and Freesat, which include quite a few channels themselves.
I've also noticed recently YouTube has started offering a lot of TV shows for free (with Ads) - guess what - the PS3 plays those too!
I think therefore I am... a Linux geek.
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.
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!
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?
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 $0.75 a costumer, or spend the money properly routing the calls, why worry about another's ambulance arriving in time...
And this boys and girls is why you preview posts before submitting, meant to insert a paragraph break, not bold :P
The most important show to watch is the Red Green Show owing to news about duct tape. http://www.redgreen.com/
To do this, duct tape a DB4 HDTV antenna mounted on a boom stick to the outside of your house so it aims at your PBS station and stay up late.
Yes. My wife and i ditched cable and cancelled our BlockBuster delivery service and now watch only Hulu+. No regrets so far.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
When i moved in 2004, my cable company wanted to charge me 75$ 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.
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, ...
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...
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".
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
This is exactly what happened to us. The person before us had cable, but when we moved in this house we only purchased internet service. Most of the basic cable channels still come through pretty well, and we also get the pass-through HD channels which are great for Browns games every Sunday. I use the money I would have spent on a cable subscription to buy a Tivo Premiere, Netflix, and Hulu+. My dad has worked in the cable industry for decades and said they often just leave the basic cable on if you are already getting internet service.
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?
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
"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 :-)
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....
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."