Officially Cable TV Free
Posted by Doug Thu, 25 Jan 2007 20:11:00 GMT
Today I’m officially (and finally) cable TV free! We’ve finally tired of paying the high monthly fees to get content. Sure, there are lower subscription plans, but none of them include a DVR or are High Def. So, we just pulled the plug. We’re simply going to rely on our Blockbuster on-line account plus our local library plus some iTunes plus some “backnet”.
I setup my old Apple G4 Powerbook (not the powerbook I’m selling on eBay) in the living room with the mini-DVI to s-video connector. Using the 1.3.1 version of Enabler (not the 1.3.5 version) I was able to install Apple’s Front Row to use as a front end for selecting and displaying shows.
I have a bunch of video and TV shows that I’ve “aquired” that are in .avi format. Using iSquint I’m able to convert those easily into the format that iTunes prefers. Also using Parsley is Atomically Delicious I can tag these with the special meta-data iTunes needs to recognize the files as TV Shows and Movies.
All in all I’m real happy with the solution. I’ve also got our family iPhoto album with all of the photos we’ve taken since we got a digital camera setup as a screen saver. So now the idle TV shows snapshots from the past! The kids love it. I think they might actually prefer sitting and watching the slide show of photos to some of the stuff they normally watch on TV when bored.
I recently canceled my cable tv as well.
For Digital boxes for 2 rooms and PVR in the liviing room + HD bundles and TMN i was paying $100 a month.
I came to realize i only watched a small subset of the channels I was actually paying for. The Movie Network on Demand was the only feature I really enjoyed.
Anyways, My solution was to hook up a program called TVTAD which allows me to specify television shows I like. Rome, the L Word, Battlestar Gallactica, the Office, Prison Break, Heroes, etc. and it just contantly checks torrent rss feeds and downloads my stories mearly hours after they air on tv, but commercial free of course.
Got myself a wireless keyboard with a touch pad for mousing and now I can compute on the large HD tv in the living room.
The quality of the time spent in front of the tv has gone way up, and im saving money.
Have you seen this: http://www.yearoflivingdigitally.com/
The writer of this blog has decided that all media that comes into his home in 2007 will arrive via the Internet. It seems to be rather microsoft-centric, but an interesting project nonetheless.
hey dude i want to watch tv now