A Cnet editor and his wife tried to “cut the cord” and ditch his pricey FiOs cable bundle, and either get their content free or through online downloads. Less than a month later, he’s back on the sauce. What a milksop!
He was paying $179 a month for FiOS with internet, phone, and TV with HBO/Showtime, DVR and a second HD box.
So he installed a 14-foot Winegard 7698P HDTV antenna on his roof to snag free over the air (OTA) HD. Including the 100 feet of coax, grounding block, and grounding rod, all the gear cost $620. Plus he nearly killed himself installing it on his steep roof. (He now recommends getting this professionally installed).
The results weren’t great, though. Big Medium fans, it stunk that CBS service was spotty. There were also audio and video breakups when it got windy, and DVR programming errors. When he tried to watch a Knicks game using a Slingbox through a friend, the video was so bad he couldn’t tell the players apart or the score.
Their other source of content was PlayOn on PS3,which streams a bunch of content to your PS3 like Hulu, Amazon Video on Demand, TV.com, CBS, and others. It’s a $40 on-time fee, but the incessant and unskippable Hulu ads, and waiting around for content to show up proved to be a chore. (They also chose not to use anything like BitTorrent).
After all the gear and subscription fees, they weren’t getting all the channels and content they wanted, and definitely not at the quality they wanted, and weren’t saving that much money, so after less than a month they gave up.
After coming back into the fold, Verizon offered them a new 2-year agreement for $110/month that drops the premium channels and only one DVR.
Cutting the cord can be worth it, but there’s no way to do it without some combination of hassle and sweat and sacrificing both content and quality. And not everyone is willing to make that sacrifice.
Recap: Diary of a cable TV cord cutter [Cnet] (Thanks to Random Hookup!)
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I don’t get any television. No antenna, no cable, nothing. Don’t miss it at all. I have no trouble between netflix DVD/watch-it-now and various online streaming sites finding every episode of the few decent shows on the air. Honestly the only thing I sometimes wish I could watch is football, but that’s why we invented bars with TVs…
We went cable free for about 5 or 6 months and we went back because my daughter was experiencing severe Disney Channel withdrawal. She looks upon this dark period in her history like it was the Holocaust or the Black Death. One can not comprehend the feeling of loss and regret felt over episodes of Wizards of Waverly Place left unseen and the biweekly dose of Camp Rock 2 denied. Eventually this trail of tears came to an end and the cable guy was received as messiah.
Mostof the commenters here seem to be single people who enjoy technology and/or are willing to put up with a lot of hassle — and are not sports fans. My issues:
1. Our family members have very different tastes and often want to watch different shows simultaneously. Only one of us is technically competent, and I’m not willing to serve as tech consultant every time someone wants to watch a show on Hulu, or a variety of websites/services, etc.
2. Sports. I want to watch it live, and I want it in HDTV on the big screen. I want to, for example, be able to switch between two NFL games on Sunday afternoon. And it would get damned expensive going to the bar every time I wanted to watch a game — and I’m not big enough to fight the guys who want to watch Ultimate Fighting when i want to watch baseball.
3. I won’t BitTorrent. Legalities aside, I believe in paying fairly for a product I enjoy, whether it’s music or a book or a TV show.
4. News: Yes, a lot of the cable-news stuff is drek, but there’s a lot of good programming as well, including BBC, CNN International, some of the shows on CNN, etc.
5. Convenience. I can handle the technology, but it’s more effort than it’s worth. Often I prefer to plop down on the couch, pick up the remote and watch — either live or programs I’ve recorded.
(And yes, I read books and magazines, play sports, coach my kid’s teams, etc. I’m curious how many hours the anti-TV snobs out there spend surfing the web — now there’s a haven for time-wasting, mind-numbing content.)