I dumped cable TV, and still have loads to watch

CelestialNavigation wrote:
iaintgotnopants wrote:

This is true but you're not factoring the fact that I hate people.

lol, ftw :)

Yah, I got a good laugh out of that response as well:)

I'm there. The only thing I'd miss is mythbusters, and thats on Amazon VOD.

Whats missing is the Nick, Disney, and cartoon net that my kids watch. I could queue and fill my mythtv box, but they'd eventually want a new show.

I'd PAY for streaming 3 channels, but no one is selling.

taer wrote:

I'm there. The only thing I'd miss is mythbusters, and thats on Amazon VOD.

Netflix has a bunch of back episodes on streaming.

Hey netflix has Spartacus blood and sand. Great show but not for the kiddies.

Hulu rumored to be coming to the the 360, of course the big ass elephant in the room is how much their subscription model will cost, and what will they still offer for free.

Any recommendations on getting the female head-of-household convinced to dump cable? I've tried to talk to her about it and she insists she just likes to "plop down and just watch some tv, dammit." Truth is, she hardly ever does this... I'd say once every couple weeks. My current strategy is to get an HD antenna and hook it to my Win7 machine, then use the 360 as the media center extender. All the DVR goodness she wants, right? I can also pick up football on sundays and she can watch those braying idiots hold up their homemade signs on the Today show on the occasional morning. We already use the 360 to watch back series (like Sopranos and Dexter), so she's at least acclimated to using the 360 for content. It's almost like she's unable to cut the $120/month umbilical cord for some strange reason. Am I alone here?

iaintgotnopants wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:
slazev wrote:
Thirteenth wrote:
slazev wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:

If you like sports you still have to have cable. Sad but true.

Not necessarily....

Might as well wring your hands and snicker evilly while you say it.

I did think of putting a picture, but... I'm just too lazy for that.

There is not a good, even illegal, method for watching live sports on the internet. If ESPN-3 has it, that works. But the quality is really, really bad. Like going fullscreen is not an option. But the games you have to play to get hockey and baseball make it not worth the effort, at all.

Sports are meant to be watched on a bigass hdtv. It's just a fact of life.

Movies, tv series are, sports not really for me.

baggachipz wrote:

Any recommendations on getting the female head-of-household convinced to dump cable? I've tried to talk to her about it and she insists she just likes to "plop down and just watch some tv, dammit." Truth is, she hardly ever does this... I'd say once every couple weeks. My current strategy is to get an HD antenna and hook it to my Win7 machine, then use the 360 as the media center extender. All the DVR goodness she wants, right? I can also pick up football on sundays and she can watch those braying idiots hold up their homemade signs on the Today show on the occasional morning. We already use the 360 to watch back series (like Sopranos and Dexter), so she's at least acclimated to using the 360 for content. It's almost like she's unable to cut the $120/month umbilical cord for some strange reason. Am I alone here?

Nope. I had some trouble convincing the wife to do it. Ultimately, the winning argument was the cost. Figure out how many hours she spends plopping down and watching TV, then calculate how much it costs on a per hour basis.

Once you've demonstrated the insane cost of cable, the fact that a third of what you're watching is adverts anway, then you have to show that there are other options. For me, the combination of Netflix on both the 360 and the Wii, and Hulu via PlayOn through the 360 convinced the wife that she'd have no shortage of choices for things to watch.

baggachipz wrote:

It's almost like she's unable to cut the $120/month umbilical cord for some strange reason. Am I alone here?

Hah. I'm the other way. I'm the one hanging on for sports. Wife is ready to kill it, she thinks we waste too much time on random stuff, and she much more enjoys watching recorded and commercial free tv after the fact.

I just haven't set it up because, like a few other people, I get cable free in our apartment, so it's hard to turn off something free.

It all depends on how you split up your household finances, but if it were my girlfriend making the same argument, I'd tell her (nicely), "If you feel you're getting enough out of it to justify the expense, that's your decision, but I don't use it and I don't see why I should have to pay for half of something I don't use. If you want to keep it, you should be okay with footing the bill yourself."

But then, we're a modern progressive couple of no-good hippies living in sin (and also both make roughly the same amount of money) so we split all our shared expenses 50/50. If you do things differently that might not work quite so well. (-:

After living for two months without US television and almost two weeks with a busted cable box, I've realized that yes, I can survive without cable TV. In the past, most of my TV time was spent surfing 300+ channels trying to find something worth watching. There were many times when I'd just fire up the 360 and watch something from my Netflix queue. I don't have the patience to scan through the entire guide every hour or wait until the movie I want to see airs later in the day.

Unfortunately, my cable is tied to my high speed internet and home phone. Having to downgrading my internet service just to get rid of cable would kinda defeat the purpose. It's such a bummer.

For the most part, I don't miss cable. I've found that watching shows in one shot beats waiting every week and sitting through commercials. I have a 37" TV with an HD antenna hooked up to my Win7 box through HDMI so I can switch between watching broadcast TV and watching ripped and streamed content through XBMC,Boxee, Netflix or Hulu. I have FIOS, so that gives me access to ESPN3 which surprisingly broadcasts sporting events worth watching.

I do miss being able to watch cable tv shows live but most stuff I watch is usually available for streaming the next day. I definitely don't miss commercials and when I had cable and a dvr I would wait 20 minutes before watching shows just to ffwd through them.

baggachipz wrote:

Any recommendations on getting the female head-of-household convinced to dump cable? I've tried to talk to her about it and she insists she just likes to "plop down and just watch some tv, dammit." Truth is, she hardly ever does this... I'd say once every couple weeks. My current strategy is to get an HD antenna and hook it to my Win7 machine, then use the 360 as the media center extender. All the DVR goodness she wants, right? I can also pick up football on sundays and she can watch those braying idiots hold up their homemade signs on the Today show on the occasional morning. We already use the 360 to watch back series (like Sopranos and Dexter), so she's at least acclimated to using the 360 for content. It's almost like she's unable to cut the $120/month umbilical cord for some strange reason. Am I alone here?

I think the big thing for us was not what we were watching but how. My wife grew up in a flipper house. The act of watching tv was more about holding the controller and flipping then watching a whole program. So when I showed her how to just pick a show or a movie it seemed weird to her because she was used to having no plan when she desired to watch tv. She would just sit down and start flipping. I took some convincing but when we bought our new house I said I didn't want to hook up cable and told her how much we would save. She said she would give it a try and now she likes the on demand nature of it all. He parents still don't know what to do when they come the look at the media center remote and "huh, I can't just turn it on and flip?"

MonoCheli wrote:

parents still don't know what to do when they come the look at the media center remote and "huh, I can't just turn it on and flip?"

So, if we go this route, then my in-laws won't want to visit either? This keeps getting better!

I think I'm going to have to make a spreadsheet to appeal to her accountant nature.

*ETA*
One thing that's really been a speed bump is how slow and crappy my 360 runs as a Windows Media Center Extender. I have the Win7 PC connected through ethernet and my 360 connected via a SlingLink Turbo. Hypothetically, this should be more than enough bandwidth. But, even selecting menu items in media center has a 1-5 second delay which is totally unacceptable. According to its bandwidth test, it thinks my connection is sufficient for "TV" but not "HDTV" (thanks for no numbers on that graph... useless). I've tried the tips out there, like bumping my PC's network adapter down to 100mbps Full Duplex. Still no dice. If I can get media center working halfway decently, that shiny might be enough to convince her.

baggachipz wrote:

*ETA*
One thing that's really been a speed bump is how slow and crappy my 360 runs as a Windows Media Center Extender. I have the Win7 PC connected through ethernet and my 360 connected via a SlingLink Turbo. Hypothetically, this should be more than enough bandwidth. But, even selecting menu items in media center has a 1-5 second delay which is totally unacceptable. According to its bandwidth test, it thinks my connection is sufficient for "TV" but not "HDTV" (thanks for no numbers on that graph... useless). I've tried the tips out there, like bumping my PC's network adapter down to 100mbps Full Duplex. Still no dice. If I can get media center working halfway decently, that shiny might be enough to convince her.

I built a small media center pc. Then you can do a lot more (go to the abc website to watch lost, etc.) I used one of the antec cases that look like a stereo head unit so it would blend in. It would have cost about $300 total for the pc (left over parts brought the price down to just a mATX mobo and the case) but is much more flexible then an xbox. I also have it on a wired gigabit connection with cat6 cable to my Home Server where I store most of the media. I had trouble viewing video smoothly when I was only 100mb with cat5 on my network. I have found that my internet connection cannot stream the full 1080 I have to go with the 720 or let it buffer a lot...

We have decided to put our sat TV on "vacation" for the summer and see how it goes. My kids love Family Channel, Nickolodean, but I'd rather they were outside anyway.

My fiancee and I just end up streaming tv rips most of the time anyway, as we don't have a PVR and never seem to have time to watch them when they are on.

The thought of putting an extra $70/month towards our debt is very tantalizing.

If we could get Hulu, and Netflix here in Canada it would be a no-brainer.

baggachipz wrote:

Any recommendations on getting the female head-of-household convinced to dump cable? I've tried to talk to her about it and she insists she just likes to "plop down and just watch some tv, dammit." Truth is, she hardly ever does this... I'd say once every couple weeks. My current strategy is to get an HD antenna and hook it to my Win7 machine, then use the 360 as the media center extender.

She could still watch broadcast TV without cable, couldn't she? You just need a digital tuner, if your TV doesn't have one built-in.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

She could still watch broadcast TV without cable, couldn't she? You just need a digital tuner, if your TV doesn't have one built-in.

It doesn't. I bought my HDTV's back when they were "HDTV Monitors." Hell, it's a 1080i Rear-projection. Hello, 2003!

So, I just did a test. I ran cat5 down the hallway from my router to my xbox. The speeds were awesome, and media center worked perfectly. So that means I bought my SlingLink powerline kit for nothing. Sigh. So, now I'm looking at running cat5 in my crawl space, what a PITA. But it's worth it if I can dump cable. I'll have a discussion with her (with spreadsheet!) and see what comes of it.

baggachipz wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

She could still watch broadcast TV without cable, couldn't she? You just need a digital tuner, if your TV doesn't have one built-in.

It doesn't. I bought my HDTV's back when they were "HDTV Monitors." Hell, it's a 1080i Rear-projection. Hello, 2003!

So, I just did a test. I ran cat5 down the hallway from my router to my xbox. The speeds were awesome, and media center worked perfectly. So that means I bought my SlingLink powerline kit for nothing. Sigh. So, now I'm looking at running cat5 in my crawl space, what a PITA. But it's worth it if I can dump cable. I'll have a discussion with her (with spreadsheet!) and see what comes of it.

Good luck! But also be careful what you wish for. While my wife was a hard sell, I don't think cable will ever come back now. I talked about getting it back when the Blues went to all cable. She will never release the funds for cable again.

baggachipz wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

She could still watch broadcast TV without cable, couldn't she? You just need a digital tuner, if your TV doesn't have one built-in.

It doesn't. I bought my HDTV's back when they were "HDTV Monitors." Hell, it's a 1080i Rear-projection. Hello, 2003!

So, I just did a test. I ran cat5 down the hallway from my router to my xbox. The speeds were awesome, and media center worked perfectly. So that means I bought my SlingLink powerline kit for nothing. Sigh. So, now I'm looking at running cat5 in my crawl space, what a PITA. But it's worth it if I can dump cable. I'll have a discussion with her (with spreadsheet!) and see what comes of it.

Hard wired is the way to go!

I'm moving into an apartment on the 25th and I've decided to dump cable. for $50 a month I can get the fastest internet connection and spend another $10 for Netflix, with Hulu and the broadcast channels websites, I can pretty much watch every show I would watch. I'm not going to be able to watch them live but I figured that I pretty much watch everything on a DVR now.

By not getting cable TV, I save about $60 a month. With that money, I'm able to purchase about 3 new blu rays a month from Amazon.com, go see 4 movies at the cinema.

I use Hulu, a few downloads from Amazon Video On Demand, and my local library.

If my library doesn't have a DVD (or CD) I want, I request it from their Interlibrary Loan service, but usually have to wait a couple weeks. I'm patient.

pjmauer wrote:

I use Hulu, a few downloads from Amazon Video On Demand, and my local library.

If my library doesn't have a DVD (or CD) I want, I request it from their Interlibrary Loan service, but usually have to wait a couple weeks. I'm patient.

Ditto! Libraries are great!

Damn, now I'm tempted to try this.

I work at a library. You ever open up a can of tuna in a house full of cats? That's kind of what pushing a cart full of DVDs out to be shelved is like. Sometimes I want to go upside people's heads and tell them that we do have BOOKS, too. You know, the things that are like reading subtitles only without the picture behind them.

'Course, you guys all know how to use a computer, unlike the patrons at my branch, and hence are probably using the catalog to reserve what you want instead of jumping all over the poor page as soon as he walks out the Employees Only door with a fresh cart. Y'all are all right. I probably wouldn't have to go upside your head.

Dirt wrote:

I admire all of your strength.

I mostly quit watching TV more than twenty years ago, and it wasn't a deliberate decision, it was just that computers were more interesting. At first, it was very strange, especially when people were talking about shows I wasn't watching, like Miami Vice. That show completely dominated my local social group, but I don't think I ever saw an episode.

If it's really an effort, it's too soon. You'll know it's time to turn off cable when you'll barely notice if you do.

When I watch 'serious' TV these days, I tend to get impatient with it, especially newscasts. It's all super-attractive people talking in breathless tones about What You Should Be Frightened Of Today. It's a mile wide and an eighth of an inch deep. You stand as much chance of actually understanding something as you do of drowning in a wet parking lot. It worries me very much that this is most Americans' news source.

The shows are still fun, though, with some shopping around. But of television's entire offering of thousands of hours of programming a week, I'm typically interested in maybe 3 or 4.

I've been keeping an eye on this thread for a while now & I think we're going to cut the cable too. I'm planning on mainly doing streaming Netflix, renting Blu-Rays and I don't have any of the hardware yet* There are a few things that I'm not sure about & would appreciate any thoughts.
* Including the HDTV, so a web-enabled TV is even an option

All the ads in OTA HDTV without a DVR will probably drive us nuts, so a DVR would be useful, though maybe not essential. To get spousal acceptance, using a PC as the only media center is out. I can't seem to find a one-box solution, though Tivo, Roku and Sony all seem close, so I'm inclined to drop the DVR requirement to a future upgrade...

It seems then to boil down to RokuHD+dedicated Blu-Ray player or a PS3. As far as I can see, the trade off is...
PS3 gives me everything that Roku/player does, plus games, minus Hulu
Roku/player gives me everything that PS3 does, plus Hulu, minus games
Am I missing something here...Unless I really want Hulu, am I best off just going with a PS3?

Any other options I've missed?

A DVR was an absolute requirement for my wife to sign on. You can't really go back to DVRless watching anymore than you can go back to watching TV without a remote.

There are definitely ways to get Hulu on the PS3. I use PlayOn, but I've heard Tiversity bandied about too. There's also rumors that the 360 is getting a Hulu app thing soon too.

Cod wrote:

It seems then to boil down to RokuHD+dedicated Blu-Ray player or a PS3. As far as I can see, the trade off is...
PS3 gives me everything that Roku/player does, plus games, minus Hulu
Roku/player gives me everything that PS3 does, plus Hulu, minus games
Am I missing something here...Unless I really want Hulu, am I best off just going with a PS3?

Any other options I've missed?

Roku does not have Hulu. At least not yet.

Chaz wrote:

There's also rumors that the 360 is getting a Hulu app thing soon too.

I'm hoping to see this announced at E3 tomorrow.