How was the picture quality horrendous? OTA is on a whole heads and shoulders better than cable due to massive compression cable providers are forced to use.
You could watch 1,000 TV shows and an indexing service would take care of everything for you without lifting a finger. I currently have 81 shows on my que for the family. All I do is turn on my TV and the latest episodes are there. There are ways to do everything, it's a matter of having the know-how.
Programs like Sickrage look for the TV shows you want to watch. They link up to theTVDB.com and know when they air and pull them down off of an indexer that lists all of the torrents that pop up. It sends the files from the indexer into something like sabnzbd which downloads them, unpacks them, and sends them back to sickrage which downloads the information, cover art, etc and organizes it into the show's folder when it's done. All you have to do is turn on your TV and you see something like this with all of the episodes already downloaded:
With digital you either have it or you don't. It's not like the days of SD OTA where you could have a snowy staticky picture. If you get OTA enough to see a picture it should be amazing.
Programs like Sickrage look for the TV shows you want to watch. They link up to theTVDB.com and know when they air and pull them down off of an indexer that lists all of the torrents that pop up. It sends the files from the indexer into something like sabnzbd which downloads them, unpacks them, and sends them back to sickrage which downloads the information, cover art, etc and organizes it into the show's folder when it's done. All you have to do is turn on your TV and you see something like this with all of the episodes already downloaded:
Like I said, I have 81 programs currently. I only watch a few but it's not any more work to have 5 than it is 5,000. The sit and browse through stations capability isn't there but with so much crap on I never found that to be productive anyway. To each their own in that regard. It works the same for movies. If Transformers is announced to come out in 2018 I log in remotely on my phone, tell Couchpotato to look for it and when it comes out on Bluray in three years it's sitting on my TV waiting for me in all of it's uncompressed HD glory.
I do pay for various services and programs to do that. It's a fraction of the cost of cable but I still pay a monthly fee to certain services to do that. I'd gladly pay the cable company if they offered something similar but instead of listening to the consumer they're trying to tell us what we want so screw them. I'm not paying $50 just to watch Game of Thrones and have the rest of the package sit there unused. It's archaic and that entire industry needs to die already. Things like Netflix are the future, cable company packages are going to be a thing of the past soon.
Allegedly of course.
It takes a little geekery to work but I have it set up where my wife can work it with the TV remote. Cable isn't flawless either so I deal with the occasional hiccup.
