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Alternative home entertainment

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by novelist_wannabe, Jan 6, 2013.

  1. Buck

    Buck Well-Known Member

    I've wanted to do this for some time.
    The downside is I don't have a landline into our property. My house runs off wifi, which means I pay for a data limit.
    If I'm streaming movies or TV shows, it blows my costs through the roof.
     
  2. Those sites are great but my experience with them is they are unreliable. The streams cut in and out, especially for the large sporting events. It just became too much of a hassle for me trying to watch a game on Sundays. Now, for hockey, they are great, mostly because no one or any significance cares of they are streaming games.
     
  3. I decided to plunk down a few bucks for a paid streaming site. Quality is good, no popups, and it has iOS/ Android feeds.
     
  4. rascalface

    rascalface Member

    There's a wealth of info on this trend here: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/topics/cord-cutting/

    Live sports is a major deal-breaker for a lot of people, myself included. It would be great if there were more (or any) a la carte options to purchase live sports, but the reality is that there is much more money to be made collecting monthly subscriber fees if you're ESPN or one of the other heavyweights. Yeah, you can live stream pirated feeds (and I had to do that for last year's BCS championship game when my DirecTV box blew up) but the picture quality is typically poor, especially if you're an HD snob like me.

    By and large, TV is a vast wasteland of honey boo boo and other garbage. It does seem silly to pay $100-plus a month just to watch MLB Tonight and the Daily Show.
     
  5. 93Devil

    93Devil Well-Known Member

    Called Xfinity last night and got my bill lowered 28%.

    Thank you "retention" department.
     
  6. slartibartfast

    slartibartfast New Member

    This. Live & local sports is the main reason to bend over for the cable company. Still, it was hard to justify $90/mo for DTV. I canceled the satellite and bought the Roku. Bought mlb.tv for the season; way less expensive than MLB Extra Innings. Between the two, and even factoring in Netflix and Amazon Prime, I'll be ahead money-wise inside of three months. Can't get the local MLB team, a big loss, but I can watch it right after the game ends, or catch the condensed replay. Or listen to it on radio, which I prefer a lot of the time anyway. Bowl games, playoffs, finals, slams -- I'm counting on (most of) them being on CBS/NBC/ABC/Fox, which I can get over the air straight from the local broadcast tower, in better HD quality than the dish can provide.

    No ESPN or MLBNetwork studio shows, either, which is another takeaway. But they're not worth $1,080 a year, either. And there's lots of highlight video available on the web.

    Yeah, it's a pain. The cable companies package everything up for you nice and easy. The internet is balky, undependable, and confusing. You have to deal with passwords, configuration issues, wifi issues and all the rest. You have to get the family on board with this new headache. Some programs you used to get on HGTV or Cartoon Network you now need to buy as a season from Amazon or Hulu+ or similar -- or be satisfied with the crumbs the producers release to the streaming services. There are a lot more moving parts to keep track of.

    But it's going to become a web-only, a-la-carte world eventually anyway. I figure every person who cuts the cord hastens the day we all can buy exactly and only what we want.
     
  7. Bodie_Broadus

    Bodie_Broadus Active Member

    I'm moving to LA in a week or two and I have been thinking about the idea of not having cable. I have a pretty fast internet connection through Clear which costs me about $40 a month.

    I already have NBA League Pass, Netflix and Hulu. The only thing I really wanna be able to watch is college football (which may not matter, because I am not gonna get Saturday off) and Dodgers games.

    I may just get a very basic package that has ESPN and whatever they call the regional network in SoCal. I forgot that even if I get MLB.TV, I won't be able to watch Dodgers games anyway.

    Then there is always the dilemma of what happens of my computer takes a shit.
     
  8. TheHacker

    TheHacker Member

    Word of advice to anyone thinking of streaming the online sports packages to the TV via Roku or something similar: Get the highest speed internet service you can.

    That's a statement of the obvious, I realize, but it's something that hadn't occurred to me until recently. I had a two-year contract with Verizon Fios and their internet service is awesome, but when I went to renew they told me that the 35 Mbps service I had was no longer available. The lowest speed they have available now is 50 Mbps. My first reaction was frustration about paying for something I didn't really need. The 35 Mbps was plenty fast for me.

    Then I watched a hockey game on GameCenter Live via the Roku right after the 50 Mbps kicked in ... big difference. I bought a new TV not long ago -- plasma with a real fast refresh rate. I thought that would help improve the quality -- and it did, marginally. But I never gave any thought to my download speed.

    From what I can see, if you're at 50 Mbps or higher, your sports via online streaming are going to look great. And of course it's cheaper than the TV versions. If you get Extra Innings or Center Ice via Fios TV, most of the games aren't in HD, which sucks ass. It should be illegal to broadcast a non-HD hockey game in 2013. The streaming version looks much better if you've got the right speed.
     
  9. slartibartfast

    slartibartfast New Member

    Roku takes the PC out of the equation. $100 at Amazon.
     
  10. You don't need 50 Mbps for streaming. I've had 10 Mbps and still was able to view it at top quality.
     
  11. Hey Diaz!

    Hey Diaz! Member

    I actually pulled the plug on cable the other day.

    My provider (Time Warner) is extremely pricey for the quality of service you receive, so I chopped the bill in half to about $55 by going Internet-only. I would have done the same regarding TW if our area had other options.

    I already subscribe to Netflix and will try out MLB.TV even though my local team is fucking blacked out (which is another subject for another thread), so I'd be spending $83 instead of around $113. Considering I've had longstanding issues with TW's television quality and have never really embraced the DVR concept, I'm cool with the $30 difference.
     
  12. Get a VPN for $8-10 a month to get around blackouts.
     
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