Author Topic: pros/cons of dropping cable TV service (Read 15269 times)

J_K_M_A_N · « **Reply #40 on:** April 13, 2012, 11:23:59 am »

Quote from: Donkbaca on April 13, 2012, 11:12:15 am

The NHL and the NBA have similar season pass packages. The only downside is the local blackouts, but there are ways around that.

I was going to ax about that. I would like to drop cable but the wife loves hockey. (I like it, but not as much as she does.) I thought about getting the NHL package because I have 2 ATV2's (running XBMC) but I noticed we can't get local games because of blackout. Is it possible to have the whole internet connection on a proxy server to make it look like we are in say Utah? (No NHL teams there so there shouldn't be any blackouts.) I know you can do that on a PC but she would want to watch them on the big screen...not at the computer. (If it helps, I am running WW-DRT if it has that option. I don't know much about it to know.)

J_K_M_A_N

Gray_Area · « **Reply #41 on:** April 16, 2012, 11:00:14 pm »

Quote from: shmokes on April 13, 2012, 10:51:54 am

I didn't read the thread...

Did you read the original post?

I'm not a sports fan so no issues there.

shmokes · « **Reply #42 on:** April 16, 2012, 11:35:30 pm »

Hah . . . No. Well, there ya go.

SNAAKE · « **Reply #43 on:** April 17, 2012, 05:06:55 am »

pro - no more cable bills

cons - ...non

Pinball Wizard · « **Reply #44 on:** April 17, 2012, 11:09:49 am »

I just killed my TV service recently and bought a Roku. For me as long as you can get an antenna sports are fine because you watch them live anyways, and between that netflix and Hulu I'm doing fine. It will reduce your tv watching somewhat because it is harder to just channel surf.

kahlid74 · « **Reply #45 on:** April 17, 2012, 11:22:01 am »

If you're into sports though, and more than just local sports, you're pretty much stuck buying some type of package whether it's online or through cable/dish. My experience has been that the packages through cable/dish cost more, contain similar amounts but are far more useable in their packaging than online. As my wife's family is from Laos they are big on soccer so I like to have lots of soccer channels available when they come over.

ChrisK · « **Reply #46 on:** April 17, 2012, 11:46:58 am »

Can you just turn it on for the (I'm guessing?) couple times a year they're visiting? A couple $40 bills from the cable company are better than twelve of them!

knave · « **Reply #47 on:** April 17, 2012, 12:24:23 pm »

Quote from: ChrisK on April 17, 2012, 11:46:58 am

Can you just turn it on for the (I'm guessing?) couple times a year they're visiting? A couple $40 bills from the cable company are better than twelve of them!

Instalation Fee makes this an unatractive option.

Samstag · « **Reply #48 on:** April 17, 2012, 12:31:03 pm »

Flying halfway around the world to watch soccer on a relative's TV seems...inefficient.

Vigo · « **Reply #49 on:** April 17, 2012, 12:46:48 pm »

Doesn't the Roku box have soccer? That would be a cheaper route.

Quote from: Samstag on April 17, 2012, 12:31:03 pm

Flying halfway around the world to watch soccer on a relative's TV seems...inefficient.

Haha, I am guessing they are not in Laos anymore.

Samstag · « **Reply #50 on:** April 17, 2012, 01:29:47 pm »

Quote from: Vigo on April 17, 2012, 12:46:48 pm

Quote from: Samstag on April 17, 2012, 12:31:03 pm
Flying halfway around the world to watch soccer on a relative's TV seems...inefficient.

Haha, I am guessing they are not in Laos anymore.

Maybe. If they're a short car ride away and can visit any time they like, I can see that being different. But thinking back to all the recent times I've traveled more than a couple hours to visit family or had them visit we've always found better things to do than watch TV.

I certainly wouldn't expect my relatives to install a MAME cabinet just for my visits.

HaRuMaN · « **Reply #51 on:** April 17, 2012, 01:34:56 pm »

I dumped DirecTV a couple of years ago and haven't looked back. We got fed up of having hundreds of channels and never anything we wanted to watch, plus the prices were getting ridiculous.

Now, we get HD off the air, we have Netflix (disc, not streaming), Amazon Prime, Hulu, and ESPN3 (since we have Cox as our internet provider).

kahlid74 · « **Reply #52 on:** April 17, 2012, 02:15:59 pm »

Quote from: Vigo on April 17, 2012, 12:46:48 pm

Doesn't the Roku box have soccer? That would be a cheaper route.
Quote from: Samstag on April 17, 2012, 12:31:03 pm
Flying halfway around the world to watch soccer on a relative's TV seems...inefficient.
Haha, I am guessing they are not in Laos anymore.

Haha yeah they live 15-20 minutes away. Wife's family is super close so after a big ass BBQ and lots of drinks/poker it's entirely possible that as family members get eliminated they gravitate towards the TV while they wait for their SO to finish.

Donkbaca · « **Reply #53 on:** April 17, 2012, 02:34:44 pm »

Don't know about soccer, but after years of having the MLB package through cable/dish, I can say that the online/mobile version is superior in every single way. The NBA, NHL and NFL ones are too, cheaper as well.

GameOver · « **Reply #54 on:** April 17, 2012, 08:47:02 pm »

Phase II of operation cable cut complete! I just ordered the Comcast promo internet deal. Installation is tomorrow 4/18 from 1-3pm. Wanna take bets on if they show up when promised?!

Once installed I will cancel my FIOS & say buh-bye to those ridiculous monthly charges. Now I just need to figure out what to do with the extra $100/month I will save...a big box of gumballs? down payment on a super-charger for my rice burner? buy my gf some lingerie?!

shmokes · « **Reply #55 on:** April 17, 2012, 09:53:35 pm »

Quote from: GameOver on April 17, 2012, 08:47:02 pm

a big box of gumballs? down payment on a super-charger for my rice burner? buy my gf some lingerie?!

When you put it like that, doesn't it make you wonder what the hell you were ever doing paying for all that TV?

ChrisK · « **Reply #56 on:** April 18, 2012, 12:17:34 am »

Quote from: GameOver on April 17, 2012, 08:47:02 pm

Once installed I will cancel my FIOS & say buh-bye to those ridiculous monthly charges. Now I just need to figure out what to do with the extra $100/month I will save...a big box of gumballs? down payment on a super-charger for my rice burner? buy my gf some lingerie?!

A joystick a month?

GameOver · « **Reply #57 on:** April 20, 2012, 02:04:21 pm »

Whats the trick to managing your hulu+ queue? With netflix if i add all 20 episodes of a single show to my queue, it will show up as one show in my netflix queue with a link to the 20 episodes. In hulu +queue it shows up as 20 shows. Multuiply that by 5 shows and all of a sudden there are 100+ entries in my hulu+ queue. Is there a better way to manage this?

ChadTower · « **Reply #58 on:** June 19, 2012, 04:08:25 pm »

Has anyone used Sickbeard in their alternatives?

HaRuMaN · « **Reply #59 on:** June 19, 2012, 04:09:32 pm »

Tried it once, didn't work for the show I wanted...

ChadTower · « **Reply #60 on:** June 19, 2012, 04:11:05 pm »

It wasn't listed in the thetvdb database or just didn't find the content fast enough for you?

Dervacumen · « **Reply #61 on:** July 11, 2012, 06:51:29 pm »

I few weeks old, but I installed sickbeard today and so far it's working pretty well. The biggest issue right now is there are few if any shows with new content during the summer so I won't know how well it's really going for a week or so when a few new episodes run. Since DirecTV is fighting with Viacom and we lost Nickelodeon, I'm trying to convince my wife to finally get with the times. I would gladly spend some of the money I save to get online sports packages that I would otherwise never purchase.

ChadTower · « **Reply #62 on:** July 11, 2012, 08:22:20 pm »

So far Sickbeard/sabnzd has been pretty reliable for me. I also put WDTV clients on each TV so I could start getting HD content.

I have a 1TB single drive WD SAN that I have been using, but that's not really enough for HD, so I bought an external 1.5TB WD drive to add (the SAN can be expanded via USB). I ran into a firmware limitation on the SAN where the external drive cannot be larger than the internal drive. Crap. So I pulled an older 640gb external drive I had around, moved all of that content (the arcade art library) to the 1.5TB drive, and expanded the SAN with the 640GB drive. As soon as I added the external drive the SAN started to be extremely unstable and drops off the network frequently. I'm trying to figure out why now. That's where I am.

The WDTV clients are pretty good so far and where there have been issues it's hard to tell for sure if that's the SAN being stupid or the WDTV.

Dervacumen · « **Reply #63 on:** July 12, 2012, 10:03:17 pm »

You have a SAN at home? Huh. Why wouldn't you just use NAS on your server? Just wondering.
I have a single useful computer that is also my server for everything else in the house. I don't know if I would ever get to the point where I might need a SAN. At some point I might dedicate a server but I hate to keep adding to my power bill with a bunch of crap "that I can't do without". We have a tiered structure here and the price per KW/H gets pretty high.

ChadTower · « **Reply #64 on:** July 13, 2012, 09:37:34 am »

The standalone NAS device consumes far less power. They aren't subject to Windows or any other load on the hardware. All they do is serve files. I can turn off all of the PCs in the house and the WDTVs can still see their media source. I don't have it fancy like an isolated subnet or anything.

Plus the main server is a beefy but older Dell Poweredge with XP and 2GB RAM. If I used regular Windows sharing and local storage it would be far less stable. This SAN is regularly accessed by 6 different clients (though rarely more than 4 at a time). XP would start to choke out if someone were sitting at that machine browsing the web and 3 other machines started grabbing large files off a local disc.

I took the expansion drive off of the NAS and it went back to being totally stable. The one downfall to this particular NAS device is crappy logging. It's running linux so there has to be a way to enable SSH and look at the OS logs. I just have to figure out how because it's a mostly closed system.

shmokes · « **Reply #65 on:** July 13, 2012, 09:46:42 am »

I think the confusion is that you said that you were running a SAN, when what you probably have is not a SAN, but a NAS device sitting on your Ethernet network. And he was wondering what would possess a home user, who presumably has nowhere near the data needs to justify the expense of a SAN, to choose that route versus a NAS device.

edit: grammar

ChadTower · « **Reply #66 on:** July 13, 2012, 10:10:46 am »

Quote from: shmokes on July 13, 2012, 09:46:42 am

I think the confusion is that you said that you were running a SAN, when what you probably have is not a SAN, but a NAS device sitting on your Ethernet network. And he was wondering what would possess a home user, who presumably has nowhere near the data needs to justify the expense of a SAN, would choose that route versus a NAS device.

Yeah, that's my work verbiage leaking into my home verbiage. It's probably not really block storage either now that I think of it. I shouldn't be using them interchangeably at this scale.


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