The gauntlet has been thrown down, that cutting cable is not complicated, and Dopers would be willing to guide me to cutting our cable - challenge accepted!
We live in Lethbridge, Alberta, and according to TVFool, we have three channels in the clear. I tried an HD antenna, and received no signal at all. I’m willing to accept that a different antenna would have a better result.
We are an Apple house - we have an Apple airport, Apple tv, and all our devices and desktops are Apple products.
We have two cable providers available to us - Shaw and Telus. We are currently with Telus for internet, cable, and home phone. My husband is not willing to leave Telus for internet and home phone, since he has his business email address attached to his Telus mail account.
We use a Telus Optik TV PVR for recording tv shows.
We currently pay about $100 per month for cable, plus $15.00 per month for Netflix. All we want from cable is our local channels for local news, and a sports channel.
Our internet is Telus 15 high-speed internet - 3-15 mbps download speed, 1 mbps upload speed.
Rogers, for example, offers a plan to watch NHL on the internet. Not sure if it’s cost effective; I think it’s free with a Rogers cellphone, but the last time I tried to use it was in the USA and NHL TV rights meant we could not watch. (So I used a VPN to England and it worked fine…)
But you’re on the right track. The trick is to figure out what you want to watch and how it is available.
I’ve also heard these guys mentioned - https://www.cablecast.ca/
I looked into it once and the disadvantage was no DVR capability. Since other than sports I don’t usually watch anything live, everything is PVR’d, this was a bit of a show-stopper.
Of course, if you go to somewhere like CTV’s website, often you can watch recent past episodes for free, depending on the network’s licensing rights.
The big question in such cases is which channels or which programs do you still want or need to have access to. Depending on that, one or another service might work for you.
BTW, by this do you mean that his business card says [whatever]@telus.com or that his business email forwards to the Telus mail account? Because if it’s the latter, you should be able to redirect the email forward to another address or service.
Your internet is slow and may have reduced performance with high def programming or multiple TV’s. Check the actual speed, several times a day at http://www.speedtest.net/ to see what you are actually getting. But since you have Netflix already and assuming it works OK and are not adding additional load to your bandwidth you sould be OK with what you got. You also may be used to reduced quality on Netflix, but missing out if you have a HDTV by not beign able to use what you got.
The sports channel you will have to research or wait as I don’t care about them and never tried.
For local news you can see if any of those channels have their own apps. Other then that the internet cable channels are usually not area specific, so don’t expect it from such services, they are great for the cable channels, not local. A larger outdoor antenna may be a solution.
You should also check if he can keep his Telus email address, sometimes they will, my dad kept his cable provided one and hasn’t used them since maybe 7 years. He called and they confirmed that he could on request keep it forever at no charge. This is also used for people moving outside the service area, so some services make this available.
Can you dump the cable, but keep internet and home phone? If so, how does that change the price?
Local channel/news is going to be a problem. CTV News Go (in your area) requires an account with a normal television service provider. That’s likely to be true for all of the local channels in your area. Best bet is to check the websites of all the local channels that you like and see if they feature any streaming services that doesn’t require a normal television service (cable) account.
Here’s a map of the OTA television reception in the Lethbridge area. Looks like you should be able to get at least a few local channels with a decent antenna.
As I stated in the other thread, “cutting cable” is technically pretty easy, but that will mean you’ll need to get used to a different way of watching television. A requirement for any local channels without using an antenna may well be impossible.
Have him buy (lease) his own domain name. Cost is about US$12 per year (and a valid business expense.) Pick one that is available and relevant to his business.
Then set up his business email account on that domain. That’ll cost another $12 per year or so. Then he can have his Telus email automatically forwarded to that account. (Telus might charge for this, though most don’t.) Or have email from his own domain forwarded to anywhere else that he wants, like to a free gmail or yahoo account, or where ever he wants to get his email.
The big advantage here is that nothing changes for his customers or contacts. All this forwarding is automatic, and they don’t ever have to change the address they use to email to him – they can keep using the one they are used to, and the emails will get to him. Now, and in the future. That’s a big advantage for a business!
Cat Whisperer, given what’s been mentioned in this thread so far, are you still interested in cutting the cable?
If so, we could get into the nuts and bolts of the process.
I don’t know how this would work - Rogers does not offer cable tv in Lethbridge, just cellphones.
Yeah, we PVR everything, too - I can’t remember the last time we watched anything live. I don’t have a problem with streaming stuff from a computer to the tv, if that’s what we end up with.
His email address is hisname@telusplanet.net (the old version of Telus email addresses); he is aware that he should change it to something that doesn’t keep us married to a service that it might be in our best interests to dump, but unfortunately he is too busy with his business to take the time it takes to change his email address at the moment. For the record, I just changed my email address, and it was a tremendous, time-consuming pain in my ass (and still not finished, because everyone has their own particular set of hoops that you have to jump through to change an email address :rolleyes: ).
We want to have the local channels, plus a sports channel. The sports channel is the big problem that keeps our cable bill so high; we would be perfectly happy with basic cable if not for that. We also want to be able to record or stream on demand everything we watch.
It does reduce the monthly bill significantly; we’re on the verge of giving up our landline, too, so that would be even cheaper.
I don’t have any requirement for not using an antenna; I just said that I tried one, and it didn’t work. I don’t have high hopes for getting a lot of channels with an antenna in Lethbridge, however. An antenna could be part of our cable-cutting procedure, if we could get one that will provide us with signal.
At the risk of mentioning the very, very bleeding obvious, if your TV was previously on cable you would of course have to switch the tuner from CATV to ATSC when trying out any antenna.
