Cutting The Cable! or Dish..

[BlueSnake01]

i could see this being an issue, but i work at a computer all day, and torrenting is just part of what i do in my daily routine. it'll be nice to automate this with my favorites auto downloading, and just weed through the stuff i want randomly here and there. i've got 1tb fill with tv/movies currently and ready to grab another to start building it up. its just nice to have a fallback during power outages or hurricanes when i have to run on a generator for 2 weeks without power/internet/cable/etc.

As do I which is why I wanna stay away from the computer coming from work. My work internet is about 3-5 mb’s, my home is in the 200 range lol So my torrenting at work is a big no since we use the internet for other things as well and dont want to hog all the speed.

I have about 2 TB’s of movies/shows and my whole house is connected to my PC server. I dont care much for the movie channels though.

 

[scott_0]

I couldn't imagine not having cable, I use dvr too much, shit, I wish our bill was that low, I pay $185/mo for cable/internet/phone, I could get it down to about $150 if I cut the stupid ass phone, but my wife insist on it for w/e reason smh

 

[96redcobra]

I'd have no use for it either, but i live on a farm and have extremely slow internet. I can really only watch netflix or youtube when i'm the only person connected. I have a jailbroken apple tv that i rarely use because the internet just cannot keep up

 

[Branhammer]

And considering I can count how many of our 120 channels we actually watch on 2 hands, even the $60 a month we pay seems kind of high to me when I can get Netflix/Amazon/antenna and pay under $20 a month, so once my dish contract is up, they are going to have to meet some pretty absurd demands to keep my business, and I bet they'll be willing to get pretty close. I think I'll shoot for $40 a month or less for my current package. No contract.

When my contract ended with Centurylink DSL, it went from $35 a month for 20mbps download speed to $75. I called and threatened to cancel and now we pay $20 a month for the same speed and no contract.

 

[Stanger00]

$120 a month is crazy to me. We have dish and got in at an intro rate of $45 per month for Americas Top 120. That first year recently ended and it shot up to almost $90. I called them and threatened to just pay the early termination fee which was $240 as opposed to paying over $1,000 over the course of the year and they dropped me to $60 a month for the remainder of the contract. After that I'll call back and negotiate again.

You can ALWAYS negotiate. Even if you're under contract. Especially with all the cheap streaming services they have to deal with as competition now.

If you're with a company that won't negotiate then **** 'em. Pay the termination fee and switch to someone else. A couple hundred now vs. over a thousand over the course of a contract is a no-brainer.

This is what I'm going to have to do in May. We pay more for the box rentals than we do for actual channels! Whats worse is that I get ZERO sports channels!

Going to get my MLB.TV subscription, VPN subscription and tablet ready for some baseball this year. DirecTV wants too much for this service.

 

[Branhammer]

See the problem is that everyone thinks TV and internet are necessities, and so even the poorest of families have it. The providers know this, and they also know that a lot of people literally can't afford to drop a few hundred dollars at once to cancel the service early because they live paycheck to paycheck, and so they go on paying $100 a month instead because it fits their paycheck to paycheck budget. Therefore, the providers automatically assume that while under contract, they have you by the balls. All you have to do is let them know that they don't and they'll back down.

Once you're out of contract, you have THEM by the balls.

 

[Blown 89]

i could see this being an issue, but i work at a computer all day, and torrenting is just part of what i do in my daily routine. it'll be nice to automate this with my favorites auto downloading, and just weed through the stuff i want randomly here and there. i've got 1tb fill with tv/movies currently and ready to grab another to start building it up. its just nice to have a fallback during power outages or hurricanes when i have to run on a generator for 2 weeks without power/internet/cable/etc.

If tormenting falls short try newsgroups. Set it up right and you'll get the sit down and watch recorded show feeling everyone keeps mentioning. Sitting in front of a computer finding torrents is old school, nobody does that shit anymore.

 

[Thehubster]

Sports seem to be the only thing that keeps people on their plans. I have never been a big sports fan so my wife and i have never had dish or cable. We have netflix and hulu. We watch out favorite shows on netflix and anything that is currently showing we watch the next day on hulu. We love it, it costs us about 17.40 a month and we love it.

 

[Rct851]

im about to with summer comming. All I care to see is my NASCAR races and playoff basketball... All of which I end up watching while getting food and drinks out and about somewhere

 

[BlueSnake01]

If tormenting falls short try newsgroups. Set it up right and you'll get the sit down and watch recorded show feeling everyone keeps mentioning. Sitting in front of a computer finding torrents is old school, nobody does that shit anymore.

As awesome as XBMC is, it will not match the quality and sound from a torrent, Blu Ray, or HD channel. Especially if you have a top TV and surround sound. More often than not, they dont carry high quality stuff, most of it is basic audio and basic HD. XBMC will fall short in those aspects, badly.

 

[pur octane]

I use a boxee box to stream for puter to tv,has xbox media to stream movies,but I still have to pay for cable cause wife likes reality shows

 

[SID297]

We have Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. I cut the cable a few months back. Bought a great antenna and mounted it in the attic. I get 14 local channels on it and the picture is better quality (especially sports) than it was with Time Warner HD cable. Moved to the fastest internet I can get too. It's sad to say that I'm going to end up saving around $1500/year.

 

[Blown 89]

As awesome as XBMC is, it will not match the quality and sound from a torrent, Blu Ray, or HD channel. Especially if you have a top TV and surround sound. More often than not, they dont carry high quality stuff, most of it is basic audio and basic HD. XBMC will fall short in those aspects, badly.

XBMC is only the front end, it has nothing to do with the picture quality nor does it have anything to do with surround sound.

If you don't like the quality of sound pass it through to your receiver to do the heavy lifting. If you want higher quality content set your scraper to find it. I'm not sure how it will fall short in matching the quality of torrents considering that it uses torrents to find files as well as newsgroups which use the same files you're downloading with torrents. If you want Blu Ray quality download a disc rip....it will play them just find if you feel like downloading a 40 gig file which, by today's connection standards isn't a big deal and is a 1:1 copy of the actual disc.

 

[GT Premi]

I was a cord cutter at my old house for a couple of years. I upped my internet service to their highest speed and told them to pound sand with their cable packages. Streamed everything through Hulu+/Netflix. Then my wife came along and had to have cable. Luckily, she worked for TWC and we got the everything they offer for free, except for our internet package which we still got at a hugely discounted rate. After she left TWC, we ditched cable again and went back to streaming. Thankfully, she has an Amazon Prime account, so we added that to our streaming repertoire. We initially missed some of the premium shows we watched, but then I had the epiphany that even if we paid for whole seasons of programs that we DO watch, it still came out cheaper than paying for cable. For instance, let's say we had maybe 5 premium shows that we watched and they averaged 35 bucks for a season. That's $175 for up to three months worth of shows we actually want to watch. A single month's cable bill would be nearly double that for the package we had. So considering HBO, Showtime, etc. only have one season of a particular program per year, we would've been saving about a couple grand a year in cable bills.

Now, here at the new house is a whole other story. We have no choice but to be cord cutters! There's no cable service and trees are blocking the path for satellite service (DirecTV, anyway.) All we have now is pitiful DSL service and even worse OTA service. So we stream when we can and watch a few OTA programs. Sometimes the DSL service is so bad that we're forced to use the 4G hotspot on our BlackBerries because it's faster and more reliable (Verizon). The problem with that is we only have a 10GB data plan and can burn through that in a single night. If only I hadn't bought the phones at discounted rates a couple years ago and lost my unlimited data plan...

 

[SID297]

I was a cord cutter at my old house for a couple of years. I upped my internet service to their highest speed and told them to pound sand with their cable packages. Streamed everything through Hulu+/Netflix. Then my wife came along and had to have cable. Luckily, she worked for TWC and we got the everything they offer for free, except for our internet package which we still got at a hugely discounted rate. After she left TWC, we ditched cable again and went back to streaming. Thankfully, she has an Amazon Prime account, so we added that to our streaming repertoire. We initially missed some of the premium shows we watched, but then I had the epiphany that even if we paid for whole seasons of programs that we DO watch, it's still came out cheaper than paying for cable. For instance, let's say we had maybe 5 premium shows that we watched and they averaged 35 bucks for a season. That's $175 for up to three months worth of shows we actually want to watch. A single month's cable bill would be nearly double that for the package we had. So considering HBO, Showtime, etc. only have one season of a particular program per year, we would've been saving about a couple grand a year in cable bills.

Now, here at the new house is a whole other story. We have no choice but to be cord cutters! There's no cable service and trees are blocking the path for satellite service (DirecTV, anyway.) All we have now is pitiful DSL service and even worse OTA service. So we stream when we can and watch a few OTA programs. Sometimes the DSL service is so bad that we're forced to use the 4G hotspot on our BlackBerries because it's faster and more reliable (Verizon). The problem with that is we only have a 10GB data plan and can burn through that in a single night. If only I hadn't bought the phones at discounted rates a couple years ago and lost my unlimited data plan...

I haven't touched my old ATT plan for that very reason.

 

[Panic661]

I haven't touched my old ATT plan for that very reason.

Not sure how it works in different regions, but I know here they try to take my unlimited data, and somehow I continue to manage to upgrade and keep it. I go into an ATT store instead of doing the transaction online, which may help some, I guess.

 

[einehund]

I used that link for the antenna... Sometimes mountains are good! 11 miles from the antenna and it is 3500' higher in elevation from me. I should get some pretty good reception!

 

[einehund]

Oh, and if you are into NFL like I am, you can get the NFL season package on the Xbox One.

 

[SolarYellow]

Sling TV...See it here: http://www.cnet.com/news/sling-tv-everything-you-need-to-know/

Channels: ESPN, ESPN2, TNT, TBS, Food Network, HGTV, Travel Channel, Cartoon Network/Adult Swim, Disney Channel, ABC Family, CNN, El Rey Network, Maker, Galavision, AMC (coming soon)
Sports Extra Package: SEC Network, ESPNEWS, ESPNU, Universal Sports, Univision Deportes, beIN Sports, ESPN Buzzer Beater, ESPN Bases Loaded, ESPN Goal Line

I may go to this at some point. Seems like everything you need for $25 a month.

Explain this toy for me. I saw it last night on Amazon and it got me thinking and left more questions than answers. Is it really like having cable/satellite with just less channel selections or is it more along the lines of having HBO GO or FX Channel on the Xbox One?

 

[TorchMach]

Sling TV...See it here: http://www.cnet.com/news/sling-tv-everything-you-need-to-know/

Channels: ESPN, ESPN2, TNT, TBS, Food Network, HGTV, Travel Channel, Cartoon Network/Adult Swim, Disney Channel, ABC Family, CNN, El Rey Network, Maker, Galavision, AMC (coming soon)
Sports Extra Package: SEC Network, ESPNEWS, ESPNU, Universal Sports, Univision Deportes, beIN Sports, ESPN Buzzer Beater, ESPN Bases Loaded, ESPN Goal Line

I may go to this at some point. Seems like everything you need for $25 a month.

I want to explore that SlingTV but I would like to see if anybody else is using it and how much they like it.

x2

If it is what he described, I'm seriously ready to call my cable company..

Does anyone have SlingTV? Opinions of it?