Update on (maybe) ditching cable for satellite |
Loading ...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.
Here is how this free six month deal works: we received one generic satellite receiver — no HDTV with the DirecTV limited channels. No premium movie channels, no splitter to reach the other areas of the house. It’s not the bare bones channel plan, but it’s not the best one either. Also, if we try to make any changes to the plan — IE. adding HDTV, adding any premium channels like HBO or Showtime — then the deal is null and void and we have to start a new contract. So basically it’s a lock-in deal for six months with the best part being the price: free. They didn’t take any billing information from us, not even a credit card. If we want to order Pay Per View then we are able to do that, but we have to call them and prepay.
We’re still trying to decide whether or not to send cable back. If we did so this would mean all our TV goes away except for one TV in the family room for the next six months. It would seem weird having six TVs and yet only be able to watch DVDs and play games on five of them. I’d have to hook up the Slingbox to that singular TV, but we wouldn’t have a PVR, which I’m not sure would last long. As mentioned before, we do have an old Series1 TiVo that we might resurrect a subscription for, but I’m still leaning toward that $16.95/month for a year deal where they give you the Series2 TiVo and then we could read RSS feeds and do other cool things. We might just ride this out for six months with both cable and satellite, I mean we aren’t paying for the satellite …
We did let Netflix go too. That experiment went pretty much how I thought it would: we used it regularly for the first month and then usage dramatically tapered off from there. I never really had time to see if those alleged throttling concerns were true for us or not. We had those last Netflix DVDs nearly a month and never watched them. Ouch. Unsubscribed was the right move there.
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Note that unlike cable, satellite needs a dedicated cable from the tuner (one per receiver unless you have a dual-tuner DTivo) back to the dish to select which channels come down. That means you can’t use a simple splitter the way you would with cable TV.
If all your cable feeds come into a central area, you can run 4 lines from the dish to that area and then use a multiswitch to run out to the various rooms. But you still need a receiver for each TV and have to pay the $5/month per receiver charge.
Comment by Eric Gunnerson — January 1, 2006 @ 4:08 pm PST
Apparently the switch is different for cable and satellite (?), Eric. The installer told me that it was and showed me the switch (I would have to buy) I’d need to use to split through our existing coax for our other rooms. Ideally, this would be switched outside where all the cables feed in from the source, but I’m all ears if there is a way to splice inside for cable and satellite without having to use two different sources. I don’t believe that this is possible without a switch box on each TV to determine which source is used.
Comment by TDavid — January 1, 2006 @ 4:20 pm PST
Boy I wish we had some of that stuff here in Australia we have generic PVR’s and a paytv suppliers FoxtelIQ and thats it.
We Dont even have bloody TiVo
Comment by Mike Beckham — January 1, 2006 @ 10:02 pm PST