We currently subscribe to digital cable plus HBO and Showtime. Lately, we have been in a bit of a money crunch and we haven’t been watching too much TV anyway, so we have been contemplating other options. My wife want to be able to record stuff and we both want to be able to watch stuff from Netflix. I would also like to be able to view video from YouTube, etc. Wireless streaming would also be cool, but not strictly necessary. What are the options here? My wife likes Tivo, but it seems kind of pricey. There is also the XBox 360, but I don’t play video games and my wife doesn’t want the temptation. Is it possible to build out a computer to do some of these things? Can it be done for less?
I get by just fine with over the air digital TV and Netflix. I can connect my laptop to my TV via HDMI and am able to watch Netflix Watch Instantly on the big screen. I have a DVD recorder and DVD-RW discs to record shows and if I want to record more than one thing at a time I also have a TV tuner for the laptop.
ETA: my laptop is nothing special. One year old Toshiba with standard video card. Internet is through the cable company.
TiVo can seem a bit pricey, but it provides a very well thought out interface, and will do everything you need it to do. Building a decent computer to provide the same functionality may be a couple hundred cheaper, but then you have to provide your own tech support, and put the time and effort into building the machine.
A refurbished TiVo HD for $199, another $399 for lifetime service (or three years for $299), and you are good to go.
Or, you can spend $300 on a build your own motherboard, hard drive, and TV tuner, plus putting it together and purchasing/configuring whichever software you want to use. If you already have a spare computer or laptop, then this cost decreases dramatically, admittedly.
A little fun fact, if you have cable Internet from someone who also provides cable TV you also have basic cable running down that pipe. No set top box needed you can just plug it into a splitter and plug the cable into your tv and you now have basic cable. That plus netflix and hulu through a laptop will make things great. That is if you cancle your cable tv you still will have basic just from the highspeed, they both run down the same pipe and since it is basic you do not need a set top box to decrypt the data
We cancelled our cable. We have a media computer the boyfriend put together - nothing fancy, but it does the job. It connects to our TV and we watch Hulu and Netflix Watch Instantly, plus DVDs from Netflix on the player. We never feel deprived and save a ton of money.
I am not suggesting anything I started my post with “A little fun fact”, I gave out a piece of information I am not saying he should steal. Even though there is no possible way for the cable company to even know what you are doing. It is just a fact not to many people know about. In fact the OP would have to read the terms of his contract carefully to see if this is allowed or not. If they do not explicitly state it is wrong is it stealing?
We’re an antenna/TiVo/Netflix family. The TiVo has made my TV watching a lot more efficient: I spend most of my TV time watching shows and parts of shows that I actually want to watch. And I watch what I want to watch when I want to watch it. Whether, for you, this would be worth the price of a TiVo and subscription, I don’t know. For me, I decided to cancel the subscription on my first TiVo when I bought my fourth.
If there’s a cable show I want to watch, I get it on Netflix. Otherwise there’s plenty I like to watch over the air. My wife has recently started watching a lot of stuff on the Netflix streaming service. Unfortunately, the free, city-wide wi-fi we use at home is really too slow for that, so she’s been clamoring for high-speed internet.
That is exactly what the cable company calls ‘theft of signal’. As a result, cable companies in many areas of the country (soon all areas) are encrypting everything but the local broadcast, educational, public access and shopping channels.
Another was the cable companies counteract this is to charge more for just internet than for internet + basic cable.
Either way, the end result is that you don’t get much for ‘free’ and in the case of encrypted ‘basic’, you never get CNN, Discovery etc. for nothing.