Today I joined what I think is a growing movement and shut off my cable TV. FiosTV, in my case. It was a long time coming. Yes, saving money had a lot to do with it. But really, how many channels of nonsense does a person need? I’d say none. So sayonara.
I’ll tell you this much, try calling Verizon (or Cablevision or Comcast or whichever bloated bureaucratic utility you’ve got) and tell them you want to drop your TV subscription. They will react as if asked to cut off your oxygen supply. They will be shocked.
I’m not giving up television entirely (although I’ve thought about it). There are still some things on TV I’d miss. But it turns out that there’s plenty of free, digital-quality content over the air. I found this website called TV Fool and you enter your adress and see what’s out there.
To get these Over the Air channels, you need is a Digital TV Antenna (if you have an older TV, you need a converter box to take the digital stream into your analog TV too. If you have a newer HD TV, you’re probably fine). I picked up this one at Meritline. It’ll be here in a few days; I’ll keep you posted.
Choosing the right antenna wasn’t easy (here’s a great list of antenna recommendations. And AntennaWeb was helpful too). There are essentially three antenna options: A small one that sits next to your TV (which is what I got); one for the attic; and one for the roof (everything old is new again). The rooftop approach will get you the best reception, it seems.
As for the rest: I’m a movie fan, so I upped my streaming account at Netflix to include two-DVD’s-out-at-a-time. That’s about twelve bucks per month. Compare that with cable. And I’m toying with Hulu Plus, which streams (some) TV shows on demand. Hulu Plus’s great drawback, if you ask me, is that they include commercials. The service is a joint project of Fox, NBC and ABC, which also makes me leery. I’m trying to minimize the corporate reach into my life, not focus it.
There are a few other things that make this harder. Quality kids’ shows will take more research (why can’t you stream Mister Rogers??). Another is giving up the DVR. There are some options out there, but I’m not going to drop $300 on a TiVo unit and then pay a monthly fee, right after I dropped Fios to cut costs. You can make your own DVR and use open-source software to run something like MythTV (a free TiVo-like alternative) , but this is a science project. I’m still figuring this one out. You’d think there’d be a low-cost, pre-made DVR option but I’ve yet to find it. One idea is to use your PC/Mac and stream to the TV, but this is far from ideal when you consider the ease of use of the cable companies’ DVRs. So I’m open for ideas here.
Lastly comes Major League Baseball. This one is probably worthy of a post in itself. I was thinking about buying a season of MLB.TV. This will stream games to your PC, or right to your TV if you drop $100 bucks on a Roku player, which looks interesting (the Roku will cover Hulu, Netflix, Amazon VOD, and others). But when it comes to baseball, they have endlessly frustrating blackout rules. If you live anywhere within your team’s broadcast range, you’re out of luck, no stream for you. This seems like a grand conspiracy to generate revenue for the cable companies. Why would you not be blacked out on your cable service but unable to steam the same content on your PC? Someone please explain it to me.
Overall, while there are drawbacks here, I’m pretty excited to be “off the grid” – in a sense, anyway. I’ll keep you posted.
