We’re thinking about nuking cable and Netflixcustomer adventures, television, movies — by TDavid @ 8:38 pm PST
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Would say the cable TV in out household is as good as gone next week.
This Sunday they are coming to hook up DirecTV (again) — one TV, one room, one receiver in our family room. This is the result of that class action lawsuit awhile back where they have to provide the Total Choice plan (not sure which one) for six months for free to anybody elligible that filled out the form. My wife was all over the form and now this Sunday we will be satellite-bound again.
That leaves Comcast cable on the chopping block. Also puts Netflix in the crosshairs as we re-evaluated usage there. All my non-usage fears with that service have been realized and they have nothing to do with throttling, it is our own laziness in watching, er, not watching movies. It was great for the first month or two and then after that we just stopped returning the DVDs regularly.
With cable and Netflix both gone that would free up nearly a $100 a month. Hard to look at that say: nah, we don’t want an extra $100/month. I’m pretty stoked actually that we’ll be back with DirecTV. I always liked them, especially the NFL Ticket which I sorely missed having this year. Perhaps next season we’ll be back on that plan.
Also gone will be HDTV support. I believe the receiver that we’re getting doesn’t have HDTV support which means unless we pony up the extra dough for an HDTV receiver, we’ll have an HDTV, HD signal (unknown if we are getting those yet?) but no receiver to decode. Not a world coming to end moment, but definitely a bummer.
What about PVR?
The other gap will be PVR. This could leave us either in the TiVo Series2 market or taking a chance on another Media Center PC. The prices of Media Center PCs have come down considerably since a year ago, so that’s certainly one possibility, although I sort of like the idea of paying TiVO $16.95/month for a year and getting a ‘free’ TiVO. I do miss the little guy as he was the best at figuring out our programming habits, but then again, I’m not crazy about the commercial skip stuff.
Oh, so many personal choices for our household on the TV/DVD front in the next week. What would you do? Any super geek readers with both cable and satellite? And Netflix is cool, yes, but you have to be dilligent enough to actually watch and send the movies back or you end up spending $15+ a month for hanging onto a couple of DVDs.
No decisions made yet, but will definitely know more next week. What would you do?
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We’re thinking about nuking cable and Netflix
Gone are the days of just setting up the rabbit ears to watch TV. These days, there are hardware considerations. Personally, I believe this to be especially true with PVRs and the like….
Trackback by Lockergnome's Hardware Help — December 16, 2005 @ 2:11 am PST
Two ideas:
1) Try going completely TV-less for 6 months
2) OR… if you like NetFlix, but don’t want to pay $15, you could always get the $9.95 plan
Comment by Adam — December 16, 2005 @ 4:22 am PST
Adam - we won’t be paying a dime for TV for 6 months if we nix cable. As for Netflix, at $9.95 (1 DVD), well, if we aren’t watching 3 or 2, then we wouldn’t be any better at 1.
Comment by TDavid — December 16, 2005 @ 5:19 am PST
TDavid, DirecTV has their own PVR (non TiVo) now so you could also go that route…
Comment by FranciscoIV — December 16, 2005 @ 10:02 am PST
Even if you were to get an HD receiver, the HD satellite rides a little lower on the horizon than the other sattelite, so depending on your surrounding trees and hills (I know you’re up here in the great Northwest with us) you might not be able to get HD even with a receiver. That’s what happened to us after we moved to property with 100-200 ft. Hemlocks and Cedars around us. Regular channels come in fine. That said, eventually DirecTV will have to move all of their channels to HD, so I would imagine they’ll reuse their higher-flying satellites and we’ll be back in business seeing everybody’s skin pores on the screen.
Comment by Sterling Camden — December 16, 2005 @ 7:03 pm PST
If you have DirecTV, you need to get an integrated PVR. You will get much better quality, more capacity, and dual tuner support. The Tivo-based ones are great, though the long-term story isn’t clear. I have a HDTivo, which has two tuners for DTV HD, and two for off-the-air HD. A great (if pricey) box, but only makes sense if you can get an HD signal off the air, as the DTV HD content is fairly minimal. But it’s not clear what will happen when DTV switches to MPEG4 compression.
Take a look at http://www.antennaweb.org, which can give you some idea whether you can get HD off the air. Also note that DTV is going to phase in their local support for HD by regions, and may not bring all of it in at the same time.
Finally, on the subject of DTV satellites, the bulk of the SD content is on the satellite at 101 degrees inclination. The satellite at 119 degrees carries locals for some areas and some miscellaneous content. Similarly, the satellite at 110 degrees carries some locals and some miscellaneous content.
HD lives - as far as I can tell - on both the 110 and 119 sats. If you get 119 now, you are pretty sure to get the HD signals at 110 if you add the third satellite kit (assuming you have the oval dish already). But if you aren’t geting 119 (either due to obstructions or poor pointing), you may have trouble with HD. My guess is that that’s what happened to Sterling (all sats are at geosync, so they are all in the same orbit).
Take a look at see if you get the NASA channel - it’s on the 119 bird.
Comment by Eric Gunnerson — December 20, 2005 @ 9:30 pm PST
[…] It’s been a few weeks and I’ve been meaning to update my post on whether or not we are ditching cable for satellite. Why the delay? For one, the obvious holiday reasons, but the main reason is we wanted to take some time to decide after seeing what we actually received whether or not we wanted to go down to one TV and one generic DirecTV receiver. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Update on (maybe) ditching cable for satellite — December 30, 2005 @ 11:49 am PST