I didn’t go into this lightly, I did my homework. Some of that involved listening to you guys here on this board. (Thanks!)
To replace cable I got:
Chromecast
Hulu
Netflix
Amazon Prime
Downloaded Itunes player.
And Aero let me sign up a few days ahead of their Sep-23 launch date here in Dallas.
I just got off the phone with the cable company and told them to go pound sand.
Man, that felt good! I’m really beside myself, I feel like I’m gaming the system. (By $130 a month!)
Still gonna miss Real Time with Bill Maher though. Oh well…
I thought I would to, but it was starting to get a little tedious. If you go to somewhere like the Netheregions, you might be able to find New Rules every week, which accounts for most of what ever made Real Time worth watching.
I got rid of cable a couple years ago too. I have Netflix right now and sometimes I have Hulu. I don’t miss cable and I still feel like I’m getting away with something by not having that ridiculous bill.
We moved recently and I never hooked up the cable at the new house. In Canada the options are more limited, but at least I can get Netflix with an Apple TV box and most of the local TV stations stream some of their shows. I was PVRing everything I watched before, so no issue with being unable to watch shows live and I can buy a season of shows I want to watch from Apple for a fraction of the cost of cable. Sports is the fly in the ointment, almost nothing is available here. There is a sports pub a block away if I’m desperate, so I’ll try it for one year to see if I can cope.
Implicit, sports and local news is the only thing keeping us tied to cable at this point - I’d have cut it already if we could figure out those two things. My brother-in-law suggests getting an antenna for local tv broadcasting, and that might do the trick.
I cut mine Wednesday. I’m still trying to figure out how to set my TV up with an indoor antenna for the local news.I’m not too swift with the TV stuff though, so I’ll have to wait for one of the smarty-pants kids to give me a hand.
Cable + internet went up 300% in six years in my area and they cut a couple of channels every few months or so. I upped my data plan with my wireless provider for ~$20 a month more for internet (which is ridiculously faster than cable) and signed up for Netflix. Altogether, I’m looking at a savings of $108 a month.
In order to keep the “People Subscribing To Cable Service” balance in the universe, I’m probably going to sign up pretty soon here. I haven’t had cable for the last 3 years, and it’s been great, but football season is upon us, and hockey season, too. It’s not that often that Chicago has good sports teams, and I must watch the Blackhawks this year.
Other than a Chromecast, what other devices are you using? Laptop? Roku connected to your TV? Apple TV? Something else?
If you have a Roku or something that uses a media server (a PC, or maybe a gaming console) connected to your TV, you should look into Plex and/or PlayOn. They’re media server programs that run on your home computer, your PC or console picks up via your home network, and allows you access to your media library, as well as a bunch of cable content (i.e. when various channels put content on their websites). It also gives you access to Hulu, so you don’t have to pay for a Hulu Plus account (if you’re already doing so). Here’s a list of shows available.
Note that it does list some things you need a cable account for, like HBO Go. So you wouldn’t get access to that without a login.
I cut the cable and went to OTA and I’m pretty happy. I use rabbit ears inside the house and pick up 15 channels, all with superb picture and sound. I pick up NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, and the CW. I also pick up a few retro networks like MeTV, Antenna TV, and Cozi TV. I can’t pick up Fox and one of the independents. They broadcast from a different location and the signal is blocked by mountains, but I’m OK with what I do get. I know my reception would probably be improved by installing a rooftop antenna, but I’m not going to do that for two extra channels. I’m not a big sports junkie, but there’s plenty of sports on the networks. There’s golf and tennis and a few NFL games.
Of course I realize you’re in Canada, but you can go to TV Fool and it will tell you the probable stations you can pick up and it will recommend the proper antenna for your location. It will give results for Canada, just enter your city and province and postal code.
A lot ahead. We did this a year and a half or so ago. In September, our iTunes bill is about twice what our cable bill used to be, because we buy season passes to the shows we watch that aren’t on Hulu plus, and they all start in September. First month of summer is about a wash, since there are some off-network shows that start their runs then. The rest of the year, we save $140 a month, even counting the $10 for Netflix streaming and the $10 for Hulu plus.
As the episodes air, they just show up on our Apple TV, and we watch 'em without commercials. It’s usually a day or two after they would have aired. We don’t watch live events/sports much, but that would pretty much be a show-stopper unless it’s only major sports you watch (AppleTV will let you subscribe to NFL, Baseball, and Basketball, I think, maybe a couple others).
Thanks for the link - we should get more channels than I thought we would here! I think we will have to go with an outside antenna, but that’s not a problem.
The one thing - the ONE thing - that we can’t seem to solve is my husband’s need for sports news, and apparently cable is set up exactly that way on purpose.
We wil be doing teh same thing tomorrow. We had bundled internet/phone/TV and it all sort of made sense , then I had to get a static IP for work reasons , so had to switch to Comcast Business for internet and phone. The price for unbundled TV was nuts, so we dialed the packaged back, then figured with decent internet and the ammount fo TV we actually watch (not a lot) we may as well go the Hulu and Apple TV route.
Also going to miss Bill Maher and GoT , but Bill has a podcats a week after the show airs and for cutting 200 bucks a month we can buy a lot of shows in DvD etc.
Is GoT available on iTunes as it comes out on the TV or after the season ends?
We’re moving in a month and the new place probably won’t have UVerse TV, which we’ve had for the last few years (but it does have UVerse Internet, go figure), so we’re trying to figure out what our options will be. It looks like AT&T offers DirectTV, or contracts with them to cover their non-UVerse locations, or something, but I can’t figure out if they have any “regular” cable service. If such a thing exists any longer.
Otherwise, we might be cable-less until we can figure out an alternative of some kind. We already have Netflix streaming and Amazon Prime streaming, so there’s that.
There is a sports pub a block away if I’m desperate, so I’ll try it for one year to see if I can cope.