Cable Cutting

[Lone Wolf]

We canceled our cable about seven months ago and went to strictly using Hulu Plus and Netflix via the PlayStation 3.  This has been awesome in just about every way.  Big savings and we only watch what we want to watch.  No more channel flipping.  It's a fantastic way to cut costs and we've got more programming lined up than we have time to watch.  Being rid of cable feels fantastic.

I know that a lot of other board members (Storm for sure) have nice cable-free setups.  I'd love to hear any additional ideas or cool configurations you might have.  As for us, our recipe has been extremely simple:

• Hulu Plus subscription ($8 per month)
• Netflix subscription (already owned, $8 per month)
• PlayStation 3 for primary streaming device (already owned)
• Sony Blu Ray player for secondary TV upstairs.  Offers Hulu/Netflix/Amazon Video/Crackle/etc. streaming support.  ($100 or so IIRC.)

I'll be buying an over-the-air antenna soon as well but so far simply haven't needed to bother with this yet.

The Olympics are going to provide an interesting test case.  As this article points out, access to the streaming of the Olympics will be restricted to people with a cable or satellite provider that offers MSNBC and CNBC.  (The mention of these channels serves as a timely reminder of what a waste my cable service was.)

The catch: The vast majority of NBCOlympics.com’s streaming media—branded as ‘NBCOlympics Live Extra"—will only be available to people who are already registered subscribers to cable, satellite, and/or telco carriers who offer MSNBC and CNBC on their systems. Would-be viewers will need to prove their paying status when they try to access to NBCOlympics.com’s streaming media feeds.

Source

So it would seem that NBC has lashed themselves to the cable providers in the way that a drowning man might lash himself to an anvil.  (Not completely surprising given the Comcast acquisition of NBCUniversal.)  Have any of you cable cutters out there figured out how you'll be watching your Olympic coverage?

[Gumby]

I have a really dumb logistics question about this... but I assume you need a "cable" to access the internet, right? It's been a few months since I've looked into this, but don't cable companies price their internet access in a way (with bundles) to make the TV side more attractive?

[smurff]

So it would seem that NBC has lashed themselves to the cable providers in the way that a drowning man might lash himself to an anvil.  (Not completely surprising given the Comcast acquisition of NBCUniversal.)  Have any of you cable cutters out there figured out how you'll be watching your Olympic coverage?

I'm not a cable cutter yet, but I'm strongly thinking about doing it soon.  I went online to price over-the-air antennas; the good ones are pricey.  And I might have to start up my Netflix subscription again; I cancelled last year as part of the subscriber mega-protest.

As for the Olympics, maybe you could check online for the schedules of the events you want to watch, then see if your favorite sports bar will be showing them.  Now there's an excuse to get out of the house.  

Of course, there's always friends still tied to cable.

[Pointedstick]

Congrats! My wife and I are similarly Cable TV-free. Here's our setup:

* Comcast internet [25/5, $52/month]
* Netflix subscription [$8/month]
* AppleTV [Already owned, but one-time cost of $100]
* Gaming PC [Already owned; one-time cost of about 600 five years ago]

...That's it. We have no optical media player since all the optical media has been ripped and is stored on a beefy RAID-1 NAS. If somebody buys us a DVD, I rip it and then toss the disc.

We miss out on current TV shows, live sports, etc, but I feel like it's a small price to pay for the savings, which go right into the PP 

[Lone Wolf]

I have a really dumb logistics question about this... but I assume you need a "cable" to access the internet, right? It's been a few months since I've looked into this, but don't cable companies price their internet access in a way (with bundles) to make the TV side more attractive?

We always used DSL for our internet.  Cable modem prices weren't competitive with DSL in our area, even with a bundle.  (Our DSL is $20 per month.)

You are definitely right, though, that unbundled cable modem can be quite high (after the "new subscribers" special deals expire, of course.)  I've heard ranges from $45 even into the low $60s!

I'm not a cable cutter yet, but I'm strongly thinking about doing it soon.  I went online to price over-the-air antennas; the good ones are pricey.  And I might have to start up my Netflix subscription again; I cancelled last year as part of the subscriber mega-protest.

I can definitely understand your exasperation at the way Netflix was being managed last year.  Perhaps Saturday Night Live's fun skewering of Netflix's awkward video apology will help you blow off some stream: http://www.hulu.com/watch/284938/

As for the Olympics, maybe you could check online for the schedules of the events you want to watch, then see if your favorite sports bar will be showing them.  Now there's an excuse to get out of the house.

Good idea!  Tougher to do with small children but could be a good approach for an event or two.

[Pointedstick]

LW, what kind of speed are you getting for $20? I pay 52 for a cable modem, but I admit I'm a bit spoiled by the speed, which is 25 down/5 up. My uncle has AT&T DSL that he pays about $15 for, but it's 3/1 and feels dog slow every time I visit.

[Lone Wolf]

...That's it. We have no optical media player since all the optical media has been ripped and is stored on a beefy RAID-1 NAS. If somebody buys us a DVD, I rip it and then toss the disc.

Cool!  I've of course heard about this quite a bit haven't done it myself.  Which server do you use?

LW, what kind of speed are you getting for $20? I pay 52 for a cable modem, but I admit I'm a bit spoiled by the speed, which is 25 down/5 up. My uncle has AT&T DSL that he pays about $15 for, but it's 3/1 and feels dog slow every time I visit.

Yeah, you have some really nice speed there!  If I got that much I would be paying far, far more than I do now.  I only get 6 Mbps down.  I don't recall my upstream speed offhand.  Probably 300 baud.    However, so long as 720p video streams fine then I'm a happy boy.

Occasionally my wife and I will be dual-streaming from Netflix and I haven't yet noticed any performance problems from this.  If there were hiccups, it would be worth my while to upgrade, definitely.

[Pointedstick]

I use Handbrake to rip the discs, and the a USB RAID box hooked up to the USB port of an ASUS RT-N16 router with the TomatoUSB (Teaman/Toastman) Linux firmware on it. It's kind of a "poor man's NAS" as it's not a real gigabit ethernet box with a server built in or anything, but it suffices for our purposes, and it was a massive amount cheaper than buying a real NAS RAID and an expensive router.

I haven't figured the software part out as well as I'd like. Right now the video files sit on the disk, and I access them on the Windows gaming PC when I want to watch one of those movies. The AppleTV's got limited ability to pull in arbitrary files, as in that respect it's basically a front-end to an iTunes library and I've since ditched iTunes. I played around with Boxee on the PC but it didn't feel polished enough at the time (> a year ago), and the PC takes forever to boot up and lacks a remote, and I didn't feel like throwing money at turning it into more of a media center machine. Do you know of any cheap set-top boxes that have the ability to stream Netflix and pull videos from arbitrary network locations?

As for the speed, if you're able to satisfactorily stream 720p at 5 mpbs down, I may have to look into downgrading.

[Gumby]

Once you have a movie/image/pdf file on your (Mac) desktop, you can just use AirFlick to throw it up onto an AppleTV. It even lets you throw those files up from a URL...

http://ericasadun.com/ftp/AirPlay/

[Gumby]

Also... here's a new cool device — the size of a USB drive — that plugs into the HDMI port of your TV and gives you access to practically all Internet-based video.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/202 ... a-smart-tv

The device is on KickStarter, looking for crowd-funding. If you fund their project, you can be one of the first to own the device.

[Pointedstick]

Gumby, I don't actually use a Mac. I just switched to Linux, as a matter of fact, so Apple's AirPlay, while an awesome piece of tech, is straight out. What I want is something I can attach to the TV that lets me stream Netflix and files I can place on disk somewhere. The AppleTV is great since it's unobtrusive, cheap, has a nice remote, doesn't need to be turned off, and has miniscule power consumption, but it can only pull video that's not in the predefined sources from your iTunes library, and even then, only encoded as an h.264 MP4. I want a box that does what the AppleTV does, but also lets me define a network location as a video source, basically.

That little TV dongle thingy looks completely awesome. They don't indicate that it will be able to access content from arbitrary network locations, although the ability to plug a hard drive into it looks like a good second-best choice. Definitely an exciting product.

[Storm]

Gumby, I don't actually use a Mac. I just switched to Linux, as a matter of fact, so Apple's AirPlay, while an awesome piece of tech, is straight out. What I want is something I can attach to the TV that lets me stream Netflix and files I can place on disk somewhere. The AppleTV is great since it's unobtrusive, cheap, has a nice remote, doesn't need to be turned off, and has miniscule power consumption, but it can only pull video that's not in the predefined sources from your iTunes library, and even then, only encoded as an h.264 MP4. I want a box that does what the AppleTV does, but also lets me define a network location as a video source, basically.

That little TV dongle thingy looks completely awesome. They don't indicate that it will be able to access content from arbitrary network locations, although the ability to plug a hard drive into it looks like a good second-best choice. Definitely an exciting product.

One thing you can do - if you use Handbrake (available for Mac or Windows) to rip your DVDs, you can rip them in AppleTV format which preserves the 5.1 surround sound stream.  Then, load them into your iTunes library, and you will be able to stream them to the AppleTV from iTunes running on your Windows or Mac PC.

It sounds pretty complicated, but when you get a good library built up it's actually quite easy to use.  If you tag your movies with the genre and movie box art, you can get quite a nice movie library on the AppleTV and scroll through them just like on a Red Box vending machine.

Here is the basic workflow:

1. Put physical DVD in your computer; load Handbrake and rip in AppleTV format - this creates a movie.mp4 file on your hard drive.
2. Use MetaX to automatically download movie box art and tag the MP4 file generated by Handbrake.
http://www.danhinsley.com/metax/metax.html
3. MetaX should automatically import the movie into your iTunes library so it will be available on your AppleTV automatically.

The only drawback to this approach is that you can't just download random content from the Internet and play it.

[Pointedstick]

Storm, that was actually more or less what I did when I still had a Mac. But there's no Linux version of iTunes, and using my Windows PC as a 100% uptime iTunes server would be possible but quite awkward, and it wouldn't exactly do wonders for my power bill either. I just want a box that I can point at a network share and say, "Hey! Grab the movies from here!"

I'll also mention that for the several years I used iTunes as my video library, I found it extremely awkward and unreliable. I stored the videos on a different disk from the one with my main music library because the files were so huge, and this presented a series of insurmountable problems for iTunes. It took forever to access the network files and was constantly getting confused when adding new ones, trying to copy them locally if I forgot to hold down the option key as I dragged them in. And for some reason, it refused to traverse symlinks when I attempted to fake it out that way. If the network hard disk ever unmounted itself and I opened iTunes without it visible, it would fail to find the movies and I would have to individually go and point the broken links to the files again. The whole experience was a huge exercise in frustration.

[Storm]

I cut the cord back in 2009 and haven't looked back.  It's been great, but just a disclaimer - I don't watch a lot of TV; maybe 5-10 hours a week, and I don't watch sports.

I've tried almost every possible way of getting content onto my big screen, so I can rank them in terms of cost, quality, and ease of use.

1. PS3 with Netflix and Hulu - without a doubt, the PS3 has the highest quality of any streaming option.  It is (to my knowledge) the only Netflix streaming solution that supports full 1080p with Dolby 5.1 surround (on the few shows that have it) - to test it out try watching any episode of Lost - this is one of the first shows Netflix put up in full 1080p Dolby 5.1 surround.  If you have a nice 55" LED television (I use an LG 55LH90, which was one of the better options a few years ago) and a surround setup (Onkyo 7.1) you will notice the difference.

Cost:
$50 a year for Playstation Plus (required for Netflix and Hulu) - you get free games every week as well.
$8 a month for Netflix.
$8 a month for Hulu.
Optional - $79 a year for Amazon Mom (in case you want free Amazon Prime streaming) I've found that most shows are already on Netflix so this isn't really worth it unless you already use it for the free shipping.

2. AppleTV - This is one of the lowest cost streaming options but only supports Netflix.  Because you don't need a $50 annual Playstation Plus subscription to use it, you save about $4.16 a month.  The new version supports 1080p, but for some reason the Netflix app on it will only stream in 720p.  Also, you don't get 5.1 surround.  What you do get, however, is a very nice way to listen to your iTunes library on your stereo and look at all your family photos on the big screen, which the PS3 is not as good at.

Cost: $8 a month for Netflix.

3. Computer - I found the easiest option here is to get a bluetooth wireless keyboard/mouse and use a laptop with an HDMI port.  You will get good 1080p quality and digital sound, but the drawback is that you have to use the keyboard and mouse, which makes it not the most user friendly option.  You do have access to the most content, however, and can watch things like southparkstudios.com that are just unavailable on most other devices.

Cost: $8 a month for Netflix - Hulu is free except for certain shows.

Another option I wanted to mention are the Roku boxes.  I haven't personally tried this one, but I've heard great things about them.  You can get them for as cheap as $50 and I've heard they do an admirable job of streaming Netflix and many other options.

Good luck in your cable cutting adventures!  Personally, I think cable packages and smartphones are probably the two ways that US consumers waste the most money.  What other way can you easily save $100 a month or more?

[Lone Wolf]

I cut the cord back in 2009 and haven't looked back.  It's been great, but just a disclaimer - I don't watch a lot of TV; maybe 5-10 hours a week, and I don't watch sports.

This is a great point.  We're also not sports fans.  I think that cable is probably much, much harder to ditch if you are a sports fan.  The Olympics will probably be the exception for us but I'm still figuring out exactly how we're going to watch.

$50 a year for Playstation Plus (required for Netflix and Hulu) - you get free games every week as well.

You know, I think that this requirement must have lapsed some time back, which really makes the PS3 an awesome option.  We pay just the $16 a month for Hulu Plus and Nutflix.  We do not have a PlayStation Plus subscription and there are no obstacle to using both Netflix and Hulu Plus.

Good luck in your cable cutting adventures!  Personally, I think cable packages and smartphones are probably the two ways that US consumers waste the most money.  What other way can you easily save $100 a month or more?

Very much agree on the smartphone costs.  I would say that even the majority of people that are quite poor consider cable and smartphone plans to be necessities.  It's really not true, though.  The world will just have to live without me being able to "tweet" pictures of my restaurant breakfasts.

Storm, let me also personally thank you for some of the tips you gave me on cable-cutting a while back (a year+ ago, I'd imagine).  It was a big help in ultimately liberating myself from cable!

[Pointedstick]

Storm, if you wouldn't mind, would you be able to share how you save money on your smartphone, if applicable? I'm very interested in shaving some dollars off that monthly bill.

[KevinW]

Our setup is

- Time Warner cable internet $53/mo
- Netflix $8/mo
- Hulu non-Plus, free
- Wii for Netflix
- Dell media PC running Ubuntu Linux for everything else
- Loop Pointer wireless mouse ( http://www.hillcrestlabs.com/products/loop.php/ )

The hardware is just what we happened to already own when we started doing this a couple years ago. If I were starting from scratch now, I'd do things differently.

We also stream a lot of Internet content outside of "TV:" podcasts, YouTube, TED talks, things like that.

Also, some people get a lot of media from torrents.

[l82start]

i have cable but only for the basic over the air channels (living in a building canyon) about 14 - 16 bucks  per month
i also have netflix one DVD plus streaming ...i plan to cut it down to streaming only, as soon as i have watched the last of the obscure spaghetti westerns and samurai movies on my list that are hard to find elsewhere..
internet is connected to my TV and used to DL movies (torrents), this covers the rest of my watching needs...

[Gosso]

I have been off the cable for roughly 2 years, and don't miss it at all.  I use Netflix on the PS3 (I can confirm that you no longer need the PS Plus service), and I have a NAS external hard-drive which links directly to the PS3 through an icon under the 'video' section of the PS3 menus.  It all works pretty well, although occasionally the NAS will crash which is quite annoying since the hard drive needs to reboot (the system is all wireless, so this problem might not exist if it is wired).

Also, I can plug my BB Playbook directly into the HDMI slot and use a bluetooth mouse to control the screen.  It works very well for web browsing and watching online TV...a million times better than the standard web browser on the PS3 and Wii, those are just gawd awful.  I'm not sure if this is doable with the iPad?

I remember back in the day when a modded x-box with Windows Media Center was required to do all this stuff...oh how the times are a changing.

[Storm]

Storm, if you wouldn't mind, would you be able to share how you save money on your smartphone, if applicable? I'm very interested in shaving some dollars off that monthly bill.

I must admit, I'm a hopeless smartphone addict... My wife and I both have iPhones and between that and her fathers dumb-phone on the plan means we pay about $140 a month for our habit.  This is next in our arsenal of monthly costs to cut.

Personally, I'm looking at using Republic Wireless, if they ever offer to support jailbroken iPhones, to "cut the cord" here.  I have a feeling that they will soon offer a plan for jailbroken iPhones or rooted Android phones that gives 90% of the functionality to us.

Also, I have to mention that we were an early adopter of Ooma to replace our home phone, and that has paid off handsomely.  I bought it in 2009 for ~$200 and haven't paid a local/long distance phone bill since.  I know now they charge a regulatory fee for 911 service which = ~$5-6 a month but we were grandfathered in as early adopters and never have to pay a monthly bill for our monthly phone service.  After 3 years of using this service it has really paid off.

So, long story short, I don't have a good answer yet for smartphones, but I suspect the killer app here is an iPod touch with a free or low cost VoIP app.  Most of us are in Wifi range almost our entire lives.  I guess it is just the "in the car travelling" phase that we need to take care of, and Republic Wireless has a pretty good plan for this.

[Storm]

I didn't realize PS Plus was no longer required - I may have to rethink this.  The really scary proposition is that once you quit PS Plus, all your downloaded games for the last couple of years completely expire and are no longer playable.  Think DRM in it's worst case scenario - all of your content is destroyed!  Sony is an evil, evil, company...  lol

[WiseOne]

Good for all of you for getting rid of cable!  I really wonder how those companies expect to stay in business, if more people wise up. 

I got rid of cable ($80/month above cable internet cost, at the time) several years ago when I had a sudden fit of realism (after entering the wonderful world of NYC coop ownership) and decided to count up the costs of monthly subscriptions.  It was eye opening.  It definitely requires some creativity to get that TV fix, but it's getting far easier...and in truth the best method is to spend less time in front of the idiot box.  Remember Mike Teavee's poem from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

I also had really, really wanted to find a box that can stream from an NAS drive, but the closest I could find was 3rd gen Apple TV and waiting for OS X Mountain Lion to come out.  In truth, a large RAID that is always on will suck up a lot of power, generate a lot of heat, and make noise, and I don't at all mind having to use the Macbook instead.

Agree about smartphones for most people, although for me it's indispensable.  I got my mother an iPad for an anniversary gift, and she absolutely loves it.  If she were to ever need smartphone functionality, she could add a $15/month, no-contract AT&T subscription - so no plans to give up her basic cell phone.  Plus, for an older person the iPad is far easier on the eyes and fingers than an iPhone.

Once you have a movie/image/pdf file on your (Mac) desktop, you can just use AirFlick to throw it up onto an AppleTV. It even lets you throw those files up from a URL...

http://ericasadun.com/ftp/AirPlay/

Go Erica!  (Good friend from college....one of the most creative people I know.)

[Storm]

You all are absolutely correct about the power usage of leaving a computer on 24/7.  I'm still looking for the perfect device that can store 4TB or so of digital media and serve it up to any device (PC, tablet, media playing PS3/Wii/Xbox) 24/7 for less than the cost of running a light bulb.  If you ever find such a device, please let me know.

The closest I've seen are the Revo devices mentioned earlier in this thread.  I think low power ARM based computers with hard drives attached will eventually win out for the home server market.

[WiseOne]

I'm still looking for the perfect device that can store 4TB or so of digital media and serve it up to any device (PC, tablet, media playing PS3/Wii/Xbox) 24/7 for less than the cost of running a light bulb.  If you ever find such a device, please let me know.

Laptop or mac mini?  2 Tb drives will be coming along soon in the 2.5" size.

[KevinW]

You all are absolutely correct about the power usage of leaving a computer on 24/7.  I'm still looking for the perfect device that can store 4TB or so of digital media and serve it up to any device (PC, tablet, media playing PS3/Wii/Xbox) 24/7 for less than the cost of running a light bulb.  If you ever find such a device, please let me know.

How about a WRT54G ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series ) or  Raspberry Pi ( http://www.raspberrypi.org/ ), USB hub, and two 2 TB USB drives?

EDIT: or a plug computer for that matter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GuruPlug