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Cutting the (cable) Cord

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Generic Eric:
My wife and I were talking about trying to lower the price of our cable bill.

We have limited options here:
Over the Air. This would include Fox and ABC.
The local cable company
Direct TV
Dish
I have yet to compare numbers to see where we could save money for similar services to what we have now. Gotta find the bill for that.

I am interested to know about your attempts to Cut the Cord. My laptop has HDMI out that I would connect that to the TV if/until I built a HTPC.  I should mention that we have Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Samstag:
If you own your home, mounting an antenna on the roof or in the attic will improve your selection of over-the-air stations.

I cut the cord earlier this month and use a PC to capture/record.  Windows Media Center is really good as a DVR.  If you shop around you can find USB tuners for $20-30 each.  It's nice to have 2-3 in case you want to record multiple channels at the same time.

My current setup is a $30 passive antenna in the attic, a PC with 3 tuners which is also my primary desktop, and a couple of xbox 360s as windows media extenders.

Get an antenna, at least 1 cheap USB tuner, and a windows media remote (adds an infrared port to your laptop) and you won't miss the cable so much.  If there's a show from cable you absolutely have to have, buying the season ala carte on Amazon/Itunes/Zune is still a lot cheaper than paying the monthly cable bill.

BadMouth:
I have the cheapest basic cable and internet service offered by Comcast. ($16 and $27 respectively)
It was the same price as having internet only and I still get the networks in Hi Def and the Discovery Channel (not in Hi Def).
Don't have to mess with any cable boxes, just like the good old days.
I kinda miss DVR and On Demand, but didn't watch TV enough to justify the cost.

The "economy" internet service I have doesn't seem any different from the supposedly faster service I had before.
Also, own my own modem.  Not paying $7/mo to rent a crappy one. (I bought my own crappy one)

I picked up a Roku player during the Christmas sales.  It's much better than the old Seagate Free-Agent Theatre it replaced.
That being said, I'm still not impressed with the content offered for streaming by the major services.
I did a free trial of the Amazon Prime; pretty much the same tired content as netflix.

Now I'm doing a free month trial of Hulu plus. (the Roku only works with Hulu plus).
This looked good from a distance, but half the movies/shows I wanted to stream are licensed for "web only" and can't be played on other devices.
I ended up going through ALL their content and came up with around 30 movies that I might watch if I get bored enough
and a half dozen TV shows, only a few of which I'll actually watch on a regular basis. It looks like there is a lot of content there, but if you weed out the clips and redirects to network websites, there's really not.
 I'll be cancelling at the end of the free trial.

I have a TV folder in the bookmarks on my laptop.
ESPN360 is rocking for bowl season.  ;D

If I could do without internet service on my cell phone, I could save a bunch more.  :-\

J_K_M_A_N:
We drop to super basic cable in the summer. In the winter, the wife has to have the Minnesota Wild hockey games. If you have an XBMC machine and Icefilms, you have almost anything you could want to watch. I bought an AppleTV last year and it works quite well after being jailbroken. We also have a Tivo HD which will do over the air HD. But with basic cable, we still get the local channels in HD so no problem there.

J_K_M_A_N

BadMouth:

--- Quote from: J_K_M_A_N on December 29, 2011, 11:51:01 pm ---We drop to super basic cable in the summer. In the winter, the wife has to have the Minnesota Wild hockey games.
--- End quote ---

hehe, for the three months of college football season, my cable/internet bill is $130/mo.
Then I return everything and go back to my $45/mo.   :lol
Most of the NFL games are on the local networks.

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