Thinking about dumping cable TV

[Dan]

Both of these are a great read ... if you can escape the clutches of that 19"~55" peephole into paradise ... long enough to get them read. <....>


http://www.amazon.com/Winter-Our-Dis...9229236&sr=1-1

http://www.mariewinn.com/plugin.htm

[stevea]

First - I love the title "The Winter of Our Disconnect ..."

I lived for ~3 years after grad school with no TV. Plenty of computers but no Inet & no cell phones back then !
I think it's a good thing ... at least for a while.

Currently tho', "my name is steve and a I'm a news junkie". I have to have news, preferable financial news.
I know you are heading in a different direction with this, Dan, but if I could get a live CNBC & FBN feed
and get the Sunday national talk shows on the laptop on the Inet, I'd drop TV altogether.

My wife still keeps up with a small handful of network sitcoms & a few PBS shows. Broadcast type stuff that mostly appears on HULU.

[rclark]

No TV here ... nor cell phone (trac phone works for us). We do have cable internet and home phone. Works for us. No newspaper either... Some more saving. I've heard from others that have wi-fi type isps and service was/is slow or intermittent.

News is easy available on FoxNews, the Drudge report, and the local news in the on-line paper. No need to listen to talking heads. Easy to keep up with politics as the debate, Romney foreign policy speech are all on-line as well as other information (without having to be 'told' by talking heads what they think it all means).....

[mmix]

FYI, The Top 25 Sites to Watch Free Movies and TV Online
http://blog.buttermouth.com/2007/06/...ovies-and.html

[YeOK]

I dropped my Sky subscription about 6 months back. We still get the free channels but most of our viewing is done via the Internet. We still have a TV licence fee (It is forced upon us), so the BBC gets the bulk of our usage via iplayer and web services, mainly news / sport.

I keep meaning to try netflix, see if it's worth the money. Maybe I will sign up later today, after my first coffee that is.

[smr54]

Just in case you weren't aware of it, at least in the US, and, I would guess, in the UK as well, you can't watch netflix streaming video over Linux.

[beaker_]

I've poked around some books already mentioned so I'll add Ideas: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds.

[YeOK]

Originally Posted by smr54

Just in case you weren't aware of it, at least in the US, and, I would guess, in the UK as well, you can't watch netflix streaming video over Linux.

Yeah, I do remember reading a few threads about it. Ilovefilm is the same from what I understand. I have a core i7 machine and a spare copy of windows 7 doing nothing, so I intend to make use of of them and HDMI to give it a try.

Not really a big deal, I didn't want netflix on my pc anyway.

Thanks for the info.

[b4time]

Pretty sure you can connect through a game console and they also sell a stand alone box of some sort that connects to your router.I also understand that some tv's with wifi can do it by itself.Of course this is just what I read and have not looked into in a long while or in detail but worth it to search the net for info if your interested in it.

[gadgetwiz]

Bringing back an old thread, here.

I've recently made the break from satellite TV, as well. I grabbed a $20 Hauppauge ATSC card from eBay, installed mythTV from the F17 repos and I'm off and running. Hooking the PC to my 42" LCD TV and using a Sk-7100 wireless media keyboard with joystick mouse, I've basically built my own HD PVR and media center. Between HDTV OTA channels, Freebox and other streaming/download sources, I really have no need for cable or satellite anymore.

$35 per month gets me unlimited 30Mbps internet + $3.00 per month unlimited phone with a nettalk Duo2, and I've saved myself a ton of money that can be better spent elsewhere.

It might not be the best solution for everyone but it works for me.

---------- Post added 20th December 2012 at 02:05 AM ---------- Previous post was 19th December 2012 at 11:37 PM ----------

Originally Posted by stevea

Currently tho', "my name is steve and a I'm a news junkie". I have to have news, preferable financial news.

I know you are heading in a different direction with this, Dan, but if I could get a live CNBC & FBN feed and get the Sunday national talk shows on the laptop on the Inet, I'd drop TV altogether.

My wife still keeps up with a small handful of network sitcoms & a few PBS shows. Broadcast type stuff that mostly appears on HULU.

If you can pickup the national networks OTA in your area, you could grab a Pinnacle HDTV Pro USB adapter for the Sunday talk shows. CNBC & FBN are another matter. I do wish the networks would offer "a la carte" streaming subscriptions to those channels, so they could be added to Mythtv's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) recorder. Currently you can freely stream Bloomberg, BBC News & Al Jazeera, as well as various other channels.

[tashirosgt]

I haven't owned a working TV (cable or otherwise) in about 5 years. The only withdrawal symptom I had was some slight fatique. This came from missing sessions of slouching on the couch half-asleep in front of a televison. When I realized the source of the problem, I fixed it by slouching on the couch and reading or simply lying down for awhile.

When I hear my friends talk about shows I'm missing, I'm glad that I'm missing them. It saves a huge amount of time. I find it amusing that some of my friends spend hours listening to TV commentators that they despise.

[trigpoint]

Originally Posted by YeOK

Yeah, I do remember reading a few threads about it. Ilovefilm is the same from what I understand. I have a core i7 machine and a spare copy of windows 7 doing nothing, so I intend to make use of of them and HDMI to give it a try.

Not really a big deal, I didn't want netflix on my pc anyway.

Thanks for the info.

We had it for a couple of months, but cancelled it as there was nothing new coming on. It was just the same stuff, and we had got through what we wanted to see.

Used the Wii for Netflix, not sure a PC is right for watching films. Lovefilm seems to have less hardware support. Our freeview box has iplayer, and get_iplayer on linux means it is easy to drop a programme onto a memory stick to watch using the bluray.

You don't need a license for iplayer, providing you don't watch live programmes. Live channels are only available on the PC version.

[stevea]

Originally Posted by tashirosgt

I find it amusing that some of my friends spend hours listening to TV commentators that they despise.

That's odd, the modern convention is to hate commentators for idealogical reasons without actually considering what they say.

[ShivaS]

I find it weird that in US prices for TV/internet/mobile are so rocket high in comparison with European countries.
Out here in Romania there's a hard competition between providers so we, the commoners, benefit the most. as an example, I pay 15 euros for ~100 TV channels, 60Mbps internet traffic and 100 free minutes in all land phone networks across Europe.
Even so, most of the TV channels are crap and I dare to say Discovery is going down the hill as well. Most of the time we're using the TV set with the PS3. Too bad Hulu is only available in US

The next step should be to free ourselves from social networks and computers, in general.

[mikee]

Go for it.
I have not had cable tv in all of the 22 years of my marriage.