Cutting the Cord

[krauts]

I was wondering if anyone here has gotten rid of their cable or satellite service. How have you managed if you have done so? Do you have Hulu Plus, Netflix, Roku, Google TV, etc?

Thanks.

[trev57]

We got rid of our cable for this past summer. It really wasn't too hard to keep up with everything. I have a Netflix subscription on my PS3, so that was one way. Plus you can keep up with most sports events on ESPN3/WatchESPN. And if you want to keep up with current seasons of shows, there are always live stream sites like justin.tv. One site I found is called sidereel.com. It sorts shows by episode, and from there it will search for direct links to each episode on select upload sites (i.e. Megaupload, videobb). Plus its free. Hope this helps.

[PONIES]

I went without cable for a while and it sucked. Unless you turn to piracy, since the legal streaming sites are not a suitable replacement. The picture quality of streaming is awful, and so are commercials and futzing about with proprietary Internet flash video players. No thank you.

Piracy is a mixed bag; the scene re-encodes everything to bitrate-starved 720p x264 files so it looks terrible. They don't come close to covering all the content that's on cable either.

You miss out on special events like Z100's Jingle Ball on FUSE or MTV's New Year's Eve and that sucks too.

Over-the-air television has an increasing number of boring scripted series like Law & Order and CSI making it useless most of the time. Funny original comedy like Raising Hope or Community is peppered about on top of a plate full of crap. PBS still has great documentary content but I'd still miss H2 HD too. Aside from those examples I mentioned and a few others most quality series are on premium cable channels and AMC.

[krauts]

Thanks for the feedback so far.

I realize the two biggest things would be sports, (No way to watch the brewers or any event that is not broadcast over the air,) along with the convience. Just being able to turn on the tv, find a program, cartoons, something my son would watch is worth something. No worries about firing up hulu, netflix or a streaming site, through an htpc, google tv, xbox360 etc.

The other concern that was pointed out was piracy. It seems that every blu-ray, xbox, htpc, etc. can stream video, but where does this video come from? Unless you have the original dvd or blu-ray, find a legit streaming website or record the program yourself, the rest would be left to finding some torrents and downloading the content.

[Ralph Kramden]

We got rid of Dish about a year ago and never looked back. We just have our OTA antenna and Netflix. Netflix is such a great deal.

[klwillis45]

There is zero chance of me cutting the cord until MLB fixes their stupid blackout rules.

[ArgMeMatey]

We've been on OTA-only for about a year.  Before that we had TW Basic Cable and OTA and Netflix.  After TW said they'd be dropping Bravo from the basic lineup, nobody in our house would be watching anything on cable.  We dropped Netflix DVD-by-mail but kept streaming.  That gets a pretty good workout, often to the point of raising our bandwidth usage to around 350 GB per month.  

Not looking back here, either.  Just pocketing the money.  I'd go back if somebody offered a few channels I want at a reasonable price, but since I don't have the room for a C-band dish, we got nothing.

I've also considered the Dish Welcome Pack.  Not sure if it's still available but I heard from somebody that he'd gotten them to drop the locals so he was getting it for $10 a month.  To me, that's reasonable.  

But even on OTA, I watch only 1-2 hours a week nowadays.  Not counting the local news, which I half watch (& half read the paper) until 9:15 or 10:15.

[Tivoman44]

Hulu plus and MLB TV has gotten me through.  Someone mentioned the blackout rules where you can't watch Brewers games live, gonna try to use a proxy server to get around that.

[GBK]

No cable no satelite since 2004.. been using OTA for all the regular programming supplementing with Netflix and Hulu as well as Xbox's Zune service.  

You can purchase season series of the can't miss stuff in HD on Xbox.  still ends up way cheaper that worthless cable..  except for HBO stuff for whatever reason.