How to Cut Your Cable TV

We cut our cable TV two and a half years ago. We've never been happier with our TV choices after doing it. Here is our story.

I posted a "how to" blog post back in 2009 a few months after we cut the cable. It wasn't actually "cable TV" that we cut, we were using DirecTV at the time. And we didn't cut it by choice, it was mainly because our neighbor's trees had grown too high and were blocking our view of the satellite.

That said, let's move on. Our current configuration is much different than it was back in 2009. Also, you need to pay close attention to the type of content we watch, because if your preferences are a lot different, this might not work for you.

What We Watch

To be clear, we have specific TV viewing habits. My wife, Tamara, and I watch movies and TV shows but not sports. We don't watch soap operas, daytime talk shows or kid's programming. If you are like us, read on. If not, let's give you some quick advice here. Some sports are available over the Internet. Major league baseball has programming on the Roku unit, as does NHL hockey. But football is not available (as far as I know), nor is soccer. There are some international channels on Roku that claim to have cricket and football/soccer coverage, who knows how good it is.

For soap operas and daytime talk shows, check to see if Hulu offers access. Otherwise, you might be out of luck.

Okay, back to "what we watch."

We love to watch movies. We aren't the type of people who rush to see the latest releases. Basically, we are too cheap to pay for movie tickets, plus the experience of the movie theater (cell phones, sticky floors, etc.) is not inviting to us at all. We are very happy to wait 6 to 18 months until those movies come to DVD.

But movies are more of a weekend thing for us. During the week, we will usually try to catch one or two TV shows each night. Our favorites are:

King of Dirt
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
The Philanthropist
Sons of Anarchy
Running Wilde
Biography
American Dad
Family Guy
South Park
Brothers and Sisters
No Ordinary Family
Glee
Lie to Me
Mad Men
True Blood
United States of Tara
Desperate Housewives
Weeds
Six Feet Under
Rome
Boston Legal
The Wire
Entourage
The L Word
Dr. Katz


You'll notice several things about our list. There are network TV shows here (Desperate Housewives, Lie to Me) but also cable favorites (King of Dirt, Biography, etc.). Many of these are available on Hulu. You'll also notice lots of TV series that are long dead (Six Feet Under, Rome, etc.). We are recycling these fantastic shows and loving them just as much the second (or third) time around. Again, we are not the types who need to be up-to-date on the latest TV shows or movies. If you are, make sure your choices are on Hulu, which keeps up-to-date very well. Netflix TV shows are also 6 to 12 months after the shows have been on HBO or Fox or whatever.

What We Pay

I made kind of a big deal in my first post about how little we were paying. Well, it has gone up a LOT since then. Originally, we were paying about $110/month for our DirecTV subscription. That's about average when you have all the movie channels and a DVR/TiVO service.

We dropped down to only $17 a month for our Netflix service back in 2008, which includes 2 DVDs at a time plus full access to streaming. Netflix has raised prices a lot since then, and we have also increased our DVD limit to 4-at-a-time, so now our Netflix costs us $32.99 (including Blu-ray access).

Also, we've added a paid Hulu Plus subscription, which costs an additional $8.99 a month. In total, we are paying $41.98 a month for our entertainment. This still isn't equal to HALF of what we paid for DirecTV, but it is higher than what we started with.

Here is how our current plan is still an improvement over DirecTV (or cable):

• Most entertainment has no commercials. Netflix has zero commercials and Hulu has commercials in everything. However, even with Hulu, the commercial breaks are usually 30-60 seconds, not the maddening 3-4 minutes you have to deal with on cable. It is quite tolerable. Plus, it is only ever national commercials (Nissan, Crest, e-Trade, etc.) These are so much easier to handle than the locally-produced garbage coming from car dealerships, carpet stores, etc. This makes a big difference in my mind.


• Everything is on-demand. There is no need to wait for a certain show to come on. Even with DVRs, you are still waiting for a certain show so it can get recorded and you can wait it later. On Hulu and Netflix, everything is at your fingertips. Hulu can be a bit frustrating, because they will often put certain shows on "expiry" for no apparent reason. For instance, Archer, an animated sitcom about a spy agency, has produced two seasons so far. But Hulu only has three episodes of the first season. These quirks are not Hulu's fault. The TV networks are absolutely wacky about this stuff, and so Hulu has to pull down and put up particular episodes of TV shows depending on the whims of the network executives. It is okay as long as you don't mind "taking what you can get" rather than desperately seeking one particular episode of one particular TV show.


• The user interface is dead simple. It is a big clumsy to navigate between Netflix and Hulu, trying to figure out which show is where and why. But the Roku interface is easy to use and does not get in the way. Plus, we've even found ways to include YouTube and TED Talks onto our Roku boxes as separate channels. Very fun!

Then there are certain very popular shows that aren't available at all on Hulu. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report are two great examples. They were previously available on Hulu but suddenly Viacom, who owns Comedy Central, took them down. The shows are available on the Comedy Central Website, but of course the technology on the Comedy Central site is much harder to use, less reliable and not available on devices like the Roku. Plus, the commercial breaks are 300% longer. Ugh. As a result, we just don't watch them anymore, even though we were once daily viewers of those shows. Too much trouble!

Another example is South Park. This is a great animated series about potty-mouthed school children in Colorado. It isn't available directly on Hulu either, and certainly not on Roku devices (except older seasons on Netflix). You can go directly to the South Park Studios site for access to (almost) immediate fresh content, but this doesn't help us much.

Equipment

Here is the equipment we use in our house:

4 normal TVs (some are 10+ years old)
3 Roku boxes
1 RF modulator
1 Wii
1 iPad
1 home wireless network



Here is our thinking. We have an HDTV projector. That is where we watch our Blu-ray disks that come from Netflix in the mail. We can also easily hook up a Roku box to it and project HD content from Netflix or Hulu. Then we have a 55" SDTV where we watch most TV shows. We have another two TVs in other rooms and each TV needs its own Roku box. Roku recently dropped their prices to $55 for the regular box, but it is worthwhile to get the $99 super HD box (we got ourselves two at Christmas last week). This means that each person can watch their own selections simultaneously in different rooms, although you need to be careful of bandwidth overloading. Generally, we find that if we are both watching different televisions downloading streaming content, we run into a lot of wait times. Our connection to the Internet is just standard 3Mbps DSL, so if you have a faster cable or fiber connection, you will probably have no problem downloading onto two TVs at the same time.

We briefly looked into the Boxee Box. It has the potential to aggregate content from all over the Web: Netflix, Hulu, Comedy Central, South Part Studios, YouTube, etc. I say "potential," because, currently, Boxee is having problems getting licensed content from the two biggies: Netflix and Hulu. Neither one works on the Boxee Box at this moment, so that's why we didn't purchase one. Once they have that worked out, we may buy a Box just to see how it is different. And to get yet-one-more TV connected to our wonderful world of Internet entertainment...

The RF modulator is necessary if you want to connect a Roku device to an older television. We have one TV that is so old the only input it has is an ancient coaxial cable connector. That's when you need an RF modulator (about $30 at Radio Shack).



Why the iPad? Well, actually, this is our "TV on the go." If my wife wants to watch a show in bed, or at the kitchen table, or on the deck, she can easily do so with the iPad and the Netflix and Hulu apps. These are the "killer apps" for the iPad, if you ask me. I couldn't think of a single use case for an iPad until the TV idea hit me. We bought the Wi-Fi iPad because we can easily use a MiFi device whenever we want to connect to the Internet via cellular. Has anyone bought a 3G iPad??? Doesn't seem to make much sense to me.

The Wii is a very nice Netflix streaming device. We use that in one of our rooms, it works great. No extra cost for the Netflix app on the Wii.

I think that covers it. I hope this is a worthy sequel to my original post. Please make a comment if you have a question or clarification. Let's get all of you cutting your cable, paying less and enjoying more!!

How to Switch from Cable/Satellite TV to 100% Internet TV (with pictures)

Summary: When it came time to abandon our much loved satellite TV service (DirecTV) we made the big decision to go completely IPTV – all our television entertainment from Internet sources. It took some research and some fiddling with gadgets and TVs, but it was worth it. Now, almost a year later, we couldn't be happier. We went from paying $110/month with DirecTV down to only $17/month. Read to find out how you can do the same with just a normal broadband Internet connection. FAQ at the end of the article.



We Like TV

We were pretty happy. We had a good TV life. My wife, who is a seamstress, really likes to have the TV on while she does her cutting and sewing. Background noise, but also giving her the ability to look up and see the show whenever she wants.

I like to watch a movie almost every night, plus I love watching Jon Stewart's Daily Show. On the weekends, we usually watch one or two movies on Saturday night and something on Sunday night as well.

So we are not TV-o-phobes. We like our TV.

We have three main places where we watch TV in the house: my wife's cutting room (used to be a dining room), her sewing room (kind of a den) and the loft (living room).



The Trees, The Trees



What happened was our neighbor's trees grew too high and blocked our satellite reception. It also happened last year. At that time, we asked our neighbors if they would mind if we trimmed the tops of their trees, they said it was no problem. But this time, we realized it was going to keep happening every year, and we'd have to ask them to chop the trees down, which they wouldn't agree to. So we needed another solution.


From Satellite to Cable?

Should we go to cable? My wife and I had both used cable services before moving in together, and we hated them. Bad quality reception, bad customer service. No thanks. But what was the alternative?

Finally we decided to make the move to 100% Internet television. But this was going to take some research.

Our questions were:

• Could we get television in all the rooms we needed (cutting room, sewing room, loft)?
• Did the Internet have the particular TV shows that we liked?
• Was the bandwidth of our connection fast enough to provide full screen video?
• Was the equipment to get us set up going to cost too much for the savings per month?

The answers were Yes, Yes, Yes and No.



The Equipment

After looking on the Web for articles (one like this one would have been good!) on people's experiences (not vendor success stories), I decided to get the following equipment:




Eee PC (Linux)





Roku Player





A GigaWare PC-to-TV Converter (Radio Shack)


and a DVD player (no photo)




The Eee PC cost about $400 (then, now it's below $300). The Roku Player was $99. The DVD player was about $50. The GigaWare converter was around $100 once you got all the cables with it. It seems like GigaWare doesn't sell that box anymore, so maybe this would work instead.



$650 Invested in Equipment

Total investment = $650. Equal to about 6 months of DirecTV.


The purpose of the Eee PC is to act as a television for my wife's cutting room. It is super-portable, so she can carry it around if she wants to watch TV elsewhere, like our screened-in porch. She does that a lot after she finishes her work.





The Roku Player we set up in our loft / living room. It connects easily to a television with composite video connectors (there are a bunch of options). We have a 55” rear-projection TV (about 12 years old) and this combination works great.

By the way, we have wireless Internet all through our house. This is a NECESSITY for this plan. Roku depends on it, as does the Eee PC.

The reason for the GigaWare PC-to-TV converter is to be able to connect one of our laptops to a TV. To explain that a little more, we will have to get into the next topic: Content.



Can We Still Get the Movies, TV Series and Specials We Want (Need?)


We knew that we had a diverse set of content that we really wanted to get with our new setup. Here was a sampling of our regular watching (just to get this list took some analysis!):

• Movies, movies, movies – from the latest releases on DVD to foreign films to back catalog
• The Riches
• The Daily Show
• The Colbert Report
• South Park
• The Simpsons
• King of the Hill
• Nip/Tuck
• Weeds
• Sledge Hammer
• Married with Children
• Desperate Housewives
• Dancing with the Stars
• Family Guy
• American Dad

Neither of us watch a lick of sports, nor do we pay attention to the local or national newscasts. No soap operas, daytime talk shows or kids' programming (unless you count South Park).

This was our target list. As it turned out, we were able to use Hulu.com to get most of the TV shows (Riches, Daily Show, Colbert, Simpsons, King of the Hill, Nip/Tuck, Married). For others, we were able to use ABC.com (Desperate, Dancing). South Park actually has its own Website, where their content is available a few weeks after it airs on Comedy Central (SouthParkStudios.com). Cost so far? Nothing.

Now for movies. Hulu definitely has some movies, but not much. Especially when we were doing this experiment (early 2008). We needed a bigger variety. So we decided to get started with NetFlix. We knew that NetFlix had a dual service, where you could get DVDs in the mail and also have simultaneous access to another set of movies through an Internet download service. This sounded like the ticket. The price was nice: $17/month for three DVDs at a time. (Now it's gone up a bit - $17/month for only 2 at a time, including access to Blu-Ray).

And NetFlix had another advantage. Now we had access to the HBO and Showtime series we were missing on Hulu and elsewhere. We have always liked watching the pay-TV series throughout the years, like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Weeds, Huff – you name it. Now, through NetFlix, we had access to these series either through instant download or as a mailed DVD.

Now we had it! For $17/month, we had as much content available to us as before, but most of it was on-demand - even better!! We could pick from a few hundred movies on Hulu.com or over 10,000 on NetFlix download. On mailed DVD, we had over 120,000 to choose from. And for TV series and specials, it was all there.



Frequently Asked Questions

In this section, I'll try to ask some of the questions I've heard from friends as I've described our set-up (my friends are bored hearing about this already).

Q. Isn't the picture jerky on movie downloads?

A. Depends. Hulu had lots of problems with jerky pictures early on, but they seem to have fixed this. All you have to do is bring up the show initially, let it cache for a minute or two, and you can proceed with no jerkiness. NetFlix download through Roku is never, NEVER, I mean NEVER jerky. I don't know how they do it.



Q. How is the picture quality?

A. On Hulu, the picture quality is excellent. They even have some of the shows available in HD. On NetFlix download, the picture is okay to good, depending on the day. No complaints, unless you are a very picky TV watcher.



Q. Do you have to have Windows for this all to work?

A. We do not allow the Windows operating system in our house. Everything runs either Mac OSX or Linux. Hulu runs everywhere, even Linux on the Eee PC. It just requires Flash or an open-source Flash player equivalent. The NetFlix player works on the Roku, but you can also watch any download on your computer. The NetFlix player is very picky. It works on Windows, of course, as well as Mac OSX (Intel only). It does not work on Linux nor on the older Mac PowerPC boxes (we have a Mac Mini like that). Has something to do with DRM (digital rights management).



Q. Why didn't you go with Apple TV or Cinema Now?

A. I've heard the Apple TV is very nice. Easy to use, fast to set up, lots of content choices. The reason we didn't go that route is that my wife is a penny pincher. If we sign up for a monthly “all you can watch” system, she will watch shows freely. But if we had a per-download cost (like on Apple TV or Cinema Now) she would penny pinch and end up postponing watching her TV show for days and days to save money. So, to save us both that headache, we stuck with everything being all-you-can-watch.



Q. Why still use the NetFlix mailed DVDs if you have so much online?

A. I can't give a logical answer to that logical question. The only logical reason could be that there is a much larger library on DVD than from NetFlix download. The real reason is an emotional thing. We like the excitement of getting a DVD in the mail. Even though I know what it's going to be. I can't explain it.



Q. What about other basic cable channels like Discovery, SciFi, Food Network, HGTV, PBS, etc.?

A. At the time last year, most of these networks were not online yet. But now they are. You can find at least some content for all these networks these days. Just check their “full episode” line up to make sure they have your favorites online.



Q. Don't these Websites force you to identify yourself as a cable or satellite subscriber? How can they give this away for free?

A. None of this content is truly free. On Hulu.com, ABC.com and SouthParkStudios.com, all shows are supported by commercials. And you cannot really skip the commercials (without some additional effort and hacking). The good thing, though, is that the commercial breaks are very short. Usually only one 30 second ad per break – that's it. I'm sure that will change. With NetFlix, the downloads are part of your paid service, so no commercials there. As a result, we tend to watch NetFlix downloads a lot more than Hulu (except when it's my wife by herself, then Hulu is usually her choice). We are certainly concerned that the cable companies will see all this revenue escaping from them and put demands on services like Hulu to make sure that every Hulu viewer is also a subscriber of a cable TV service. But so far, that has not happened. (Please, please, don't let it happen!)



Q. What about sports?

A. Sorry, I don't have a clue. Do some research on ESPN, etc. maybe they have some options. I think the NHL has an online viewing package for all the local games.



Q. How long do you have to wait before a show begins on download?

A. On NetFlix, it is usually about one minute. Then it starts, and never skips, jerks or has to reload. Hardly ever. With Hulu, you put it on pause at the beginning, wait for about two minutes to let it load, and away you go.



Q. Does this work on slow DSL connections?

A. Yep. That's what we have. We probably have the slowest broadband you can get. (If you still have dial-up, stop reading now.) However, if you have the slowest cable connection, you might have trouble. I think most cable Internet providers have higher bandwidth choices, so definitely factor that additional cost into your calculations before switching.



Q. Do you watch other content besides the professionally produced TV content?

A. Oh yes. We watch video podcasts and other TV series that are only available on the Web, like the excellent “Something To Be Desired” (now in its sixth season). Most YouTube videos we watch are on our computers, not through the TVs. It's funny to find old, dead networks like The WB on the Web as well. This was their opportunity to recycle all that old content, some of it is pretty good. You can also use directories BlinkX.com to find new independent video.



Q. What do you do about high-definition (HD) content?


A. It costs $3/month extra at NetFlix to get Blu-Ray DVDs, which we gladly pay. We have an HD projector and a Blu-Ray DVD player, so we use these on special occasions (most weekends) to play some big epic movie or whatever. It projects out to about a 6 ft by 5 ft image – really impressive. It's so nice to have a big white wall. NetFlix has HD downloads on some movies (very few) and the Roku can easily connect to our HD projector. Hulu also has HD content, for that we connect our Eee PC or other laptop to the HD projector. I would say we watch less than 10% of our content on HD. Even the HD movies seem to download in a reasonable amount of time and do not have jerkiness thereafter. Amazing - I don't know how that's possible with just a normal DSL connection.




Q. Is the Eee PC powerful enough to watch full-screen video?

A. We've never had a problem. The only problem is with the bandwidth coming in, and that is solved by pausing the show for a minute or two to let the content cache, then it's fine.



Q. What about when you travel?

A. I'm a computer consultant, so I travel a lot. No problem. My NetFlix downloads and Hulu come with me on my laptop. Hotel Internet connections are always too slow, however, so I always use my wireless modem from Verizon Wireless.



Q. How does this work for people outside the U.S.?

A. Not worth a crap. Sorry.



Q. Do you use Boxee, Square Connect or another service as an content directory?

A. We don't. I just set up a Web page for my wife and we left it at that. These services are very intriguing, and once they have Hulu and the NetFlix content all integrated into one service, we will probably switch.



Q. Are you happy with Internet TV?

A. Yes, extremely. It's been almost a year post-satellite and we don't miss it one bit. It is scary to think if our Internet connection would ever go down, we'd have no e-mail, Web surfing or TV. But, luckily, that hasn't happened yet.

Hulu Doesn't Suck!!

The first part of this story is familiar. Young startup companies (e.g. YouTube, BrightCove, etc.) produce amazing Websites that are able to host television shows (or snippets), movies and homemade videos. The Websites become hugely popular. The television and movie studios, owners of the copyrights to the content, sue the startups.

With me so far?

The way the story is supposed to continue is like this. The television and movie studios finally (years later) come out with their own Website to host their own content and blow it. The Websites are hard to use, are cluttered with ads and nobody goes there.

But, this time, that didn't happen.

Fox and NBC did a joint venture, no less, to produce a Website to feature their content. This Website, announced long ago, would start out with a little bit of content, including movies, television series, news programs and even snippets of popular segments. It would be viewable online but no content would be downloadable.

Well, it's here. It's called Hulu. And guess what? It doesn't suck.

In fact, it's pretty amazing. I personally love the site. But my wife, she's gone bananas. Let me back up a second.

My wife is a seamstress. She does a lot of work in what we call "the cutting room" where she has a TV to keep her company during some of the most boring parts of sewing. That TV had gone on the fritz recently and we decided to replace it or change our service to fix the problem.

But Hulu fixed the problem for us. Now she takes one of my laptops into her cutting room, fires up Hulu and watches a show while she's cutting. Simple.

Here are Hulu's benefits:

1. Hulu is incredibly easy to use. The placement of every button is intuitive, the behavior of every widget is predictable. It just works. It's the iPod of online video.
   
2. Hulu is free. Every TV show and movie is delivered for no charge.
3. Hulu's commercials are non-intrusive. There are commercials in every Hulu movie and TV show. But the commercial breaks are short (one commercial per break) and not that annoying. You cannot fast forward through the commercial. For me, that might actually be a problem, because I hate watching any kind of commercial, but my wife doesn't care. She's only half-listening most of the time anyway.
4. Hulu's content is good enough for now. Hulu has a nice mix of new and old TV series, plus a couple of pages of movies. The on-demand feature is so nice. Just decide which movie you want to see and it starts right there. For free. And I am sure that Fox and NBC are working to continue populating the site with more and more content. I see the series and movies coming on-stream every day.
5. There are even social aspects to Hulu. You can send a movie to a friend (e-mail them the link). You can send a snippet that you choose (a minute or an hour) to a friend (again - with a link).
6. Hulu video is good quality. Jump to full-screen video and you've got nearly television quality video. It's quite nice.

Congratulations to Fox and NBC. Great job! I could give a rundown of the downside of Hulu but that is documented sufficiently elsewhere. For now I just want to give a high five to Fox and NBC for a job well done.

By the way - there are even competitors to Hulu. Veoh and Joost are in this same space - what you could call "legal commercial video" and also doing well. I still prefer Hulu, but it's nice to see several services popping up like this.

Why I Had to Cut Down Four Trees So My Wife Could See the Sopranos Finale

Our neighbor has lots of mature trees. In fact, that was one of the reasons for us moving here. But once in a while, a tree (or four) has to be sacrificed for a higher purpose. In this case, my wife's Sopranos addiction.

Our satellite TV reception (through DirecTV) had been getting worse and worse for the past month or two. I knew what it was. I called the DirecTV support line just in case, but we both quickly came to the same conclusion - our trees were getting in the way of our satellite minidish's view of the southern sky.

It got worse and worse until our satellite system completely shut down. We were getting no programming whatsoever. In a way, it was nice not having a TV to turn to for entertainment. But I could not foresee an imminent disaster that was about to overtake our little household.

The Series Finale of the Sopranos was coming up on Sunday, and my wife dearly loved the series. I had watched some episodes of previous seasons, but had missed every episode of this current, and known to be final, season.


My wife missed the previous week, but when she found out that the Season Finale was coming up, she demanded that we get our satellite system fixed, come hell or high water.

I ditched whatever weekend plans I had had and set to work on figuring out what to do. We could call a tree service and probably get it all cleaned up, but that would probably cost a few hundred dollars. Besides, I had a handy electric chainsaw (that I enjoyed using), so why not try it myself?

The trees were no more than 6 inches wide at the base, so I cut each one down with the chainsaw. It worked pretty well. The trees were thin but pretty tall - 25-30 feet (which was the whole problem).

I didn't damage anything with trees falling all over the place, and then proceeded to cut them up into small pieces.


I got the job done in about 4-5 hours, then went into the house and gingerly turned on the TV and satellite receiver. It worked! We had almost flawless reception.

I say "almost" because the Sopranos came in perfectly (imagine our panic when the screen blanked out in the diner as Meadow was walking in!!) but this past week we've had one or two digital "blips" that indicate there's more cuttin' to do.

It will be constant battle now. Hopefully we can just cut the tops off the trees as they get bigger. With the four trees I cut down, they were actually "volunteers" in our neighbor's yard that they wanted to get rid of anyway. But the next time, it might not be so simple.