I am switching to Roku. I love the freedom and seriously do not miss 100 info commercial channels! But!!! I can not get current AMC shows other than to pay Amazon.
Anyone know of a good source to get my Walking Dead fix?
I don’t think so, having paid up for the final half season of Breaking Bad myself. But it’s still a lot cheaper than cable or satellite TV.
Not legally, no.
But it’s hardly freedom if you can’t get all the shows you want, now is it?
Freedom is paying just for the shows you actually want if you can’t get it for free.
Paying for the few shows you really watch is still much cheaper than paying for a trainload of shit you don’t. There are rarely more than two quality shows running in any given month, so at $20-25 each for the whole run you’re paying a fraction of cable or satellite… plus you own them and can rerun them any time you like, and there are NO commercials; none. Not even the shortened ones you see on older on-demand titles from Comcast etc. That alone makes doing it this way worthwhile.
@TBG: It’s freedom if you only pay for what you actually want to watch, yes. Paying $1000 or more a year so you can watch a few offerings “free” is pretty stupid, IMHO.
Depends. A full season of most shows is ~$30 unless you pay for HD, then it’s higher. I get satellite right now for $74/mo. All it takes is 3 show purchases or 3 seasons of one show to blow past a cable/satellite where you get the show you are paying for plus a bazillion others (granted, you’ll never watch). I don’t call that freedom, I call it a ripoff (paying that much for a season…or $2/show, $3/show for HD.
I’d prefer to pirate shows rather than pay nearly the amount it costs for a full subscription to cable/satellite service for just a couple of them. Rip. Off.
FX, AMC, and TNT are particularly bad in this rip-off regard. Hell, to watch their shows online “for free” you have to have a current subscription to a full cable/satellite provider…so why the HELL are you watching them on their home website? You get it from your cable/satellite provider ALONG WITH A DVR to record it. Ridiculous.
I have a Roku and have been test-driving HuluPlus and Amazon Prime. Neither is worth it even at $7.99/mo because nearly every show I want to watch and do watch is not available to either (Walking Dead, Justified, The Bridge, Longmire, White Collar, Major Crimes). You CAN get them all from Amazon but that would cost you WAY more than a decent cable/satellite subscription except for Justified which Amazon Prime does carry, thus they are a rip-off. Worse, HuluPlus shows some of the afore mentioned shows as available on their Hulu.com website, but not available via HuluPlus. That would be great and fine by me because I could just watch the shows I can on HuluPlus and for others jump on over to Hulu.com and watch them there with commercials. Nope, can’t do it as Hulu lied. Every single show they told me was “available on Hulu.com” is NOT available there. All you can get there are clips, interviews, etc, no episodes.
There’s very little “freedom” available here via roku as defined in the first post. Paying for seasons you want costs a LOT more than paying the blood money to cable/satellite providers. Thus, this “freedom” costs you MUCH more than “losing” the freedom and paying for a basic cable/satellite package. You ARE better off pirating, if possible.
We are dropping cable. Between a Netflix membership and Amazon Prime - and an internet connection, we can spend half what we do with cable - even if we buy the few shows we want immediately from Amazon Prime. That list is pretty small. The shows we want are $2 each, and there are at most 28 of them a year. For the most part I’m happy to watch shows that were shown a few years ago. I don’t need to keep up with current TV. I taped every episode of Downton Abbey to watch last year, and ended up watching it off Amazon Prime for free a few weeks ago.
We’d have Amazon Prime for the free shipping anyway.
ETA: We wouldn’t do this if we hadn’t made sure that the shows we wanted show up on Amazon for pay within a few days of release. My daughter is not waiting for Doctor Who.