Cutting the Cord

As cable television has gotten more expensive, I have seriously thought about cutting the cord and doing without. Maybe the thing that bothers me the most is that cable companies charge you for broadcast channels that you can receive for free with an antenna. But I have suffered through cable because I love having a DVR and being able to record my favorite shows and watch them when I want, skipping over the commercials. The other really difficult part is that there are really only two internet companies (Comcast and AT&T) and both of them usually require you to bundle television with your internet in order to give you any kind of decent deal. For a while I had $20 internet from Comcast and TV through Dish for $60, then I got TV and internet from Comcast for $75, but lost almost all of my cable channels. Right now I am at the end of my contract with Comcast Xfinity. They want $80 for internet only, or they are willing to give me discounts that will come to $80 for a very basic cable and internet plan. So they were kind of throwing in cable for free. In fact, they threw in HBO, Showtime, and Starz for the last year. While I enjoy some of the movies, the only HBO show I watch regularly is Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. I never got into Game of Thrones or watched Westworld. Now in my second year, I can’t get HBO free for another year, though they were willing to offer Cinemax.

Knowing my contract was up, I went ahead and bought a small indoor antenna by Mohu to see what kind of broadcast reception I could get easily (I still have a giant outdoor antenna, but it always gave me mixed results with previous receivers). When I hooked it up to my living room TV the results were pretty mixed, but I got much better results hooking it up to the TV in my back room which faces towards Atlanta and most of the transmission towers.

What I really needed was something that could record over the air broadcasts. You can get a TV tuner card for your computer and record shows to your computer’s hard drive or you can get a stand alone box that records to an internal or external hard drive. Tivo makes a box called a Roamio that does this, but it only hooks up to one TV which means the antenna has to be somewhere near the TV. Not that great. Another option is called Tablo which records shows to a hard drive on the wifi network so that any TV can use an app to play that content. That’s nice because I could put the Tablo and antenna in the back of the house where reception is better and then watch from my TV in the living room. The only problem is my TV doesn’t have a Tablo app, so I would probably have to buy a Roku for my living room TV. The TV in the back room can show content by using an app on my phone and using Chromecast to the TV. This seemed like the best solution, but they do charge either $5 per month, $50 per year, or a one-time fee of $150 for a program guide (which isn’t 100% necessary, but makes it easier to use). There were a couple of other solutions, one by Channel Master called HDHomeRun (ethernet only) and a $30 box by Mediasonic called Homeworx that can receive and record TV kind of like an old VCR. Tablo seemed like it was the most flexible, so I went ahead and ordered one from Best Buy for $200. Even if I have to buy a Roku for my living room TV, the system should pay for itself in the first year, though I am limited to broadcast only so it isn’t really a cable substitute. I still have plenty of Blu-rays to watch and can buy more, including digital copies of cable shows, fairly inexpensively (I just bought a digital copy of all 60 episodes of HBO’s acclaimed show The Wire for $8) so I don’t feel like I need the movie channels and my crappy Xfinity package had so few cable channels that I pretty much only had broadcast anyway.

I checked with AT&T and they had a deal where they would give internet for $40 per month, which isn’t that bad and they aren’t requiring a TV bundle to get it. So I went ahead and signed up for that. In the past AT&T has always been sneaky about charging extra for non-extras like DVR or HD, but since I wasn’t getting TV, the only extra was going to be a modem and router, which they were going to include free. In a year they will go up, but hopefully something else will come along then.