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Have you cancelled your Cable / Satellite TV service?
- Thread starter palmerc2
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No. My DirecTV service will be with me for the foreseeable future. Too few streaming options for live sports. Until there is something streaming for college football and the NFL Sunday Ticket.....I'm going to keep on going with Direct.
Dish has the same option. I did that for a month. When I decided that I didn't miss cable one bit, I cancelled my account. I've been building a DVD/iTunes collection a little along for 10 years. I don't even bother with Netflix or Hulu. I own everything I want to watch.
Been cable free for 50 days... Well, early on in the first week, I tried just not turning it on. A bad storm came up, so I gave in and flipped the TV on. Dish was out, of course. Fortunately, a local channel streams severe weather coverage over the internet. Problem solved.
I just did recently, opted for ATV with Netflix and Hulu. I just got tired of Comcast dicking around with the price every month. I HATE all that "3 months at this price, 6 months at that price, this price normally" BS. Just give me one reasonable rate. I had a "customer appreciation" thing that kept expiring, that I had to keep calling to re-up every few months. It just got old.
There's a few things I can't watch, but overall I don't miss it. For the few shows that I watch each season that Hulu doesn't have (Archer and Mad Men to name a couple), I just buy those on iTunes. Even if I end up buying 4 or 5 shows on iTunes over the course of the year, I still save a bunch of money compared to cable.
There's a few things I can't watch, but overall I don't miss it. For the few shows that I watch each season that Hulu doesn't have (Archer and Mad Men to name a couple), I just buy those on iTunes. Even if I end up buying 4 or 5 shows on iTunes over the course of the year, I still save a bunch of money compared to cable.
Perhaps people just get bored of all the self-righteous "I've never done that" (followed by uptick, uptick), "I don't do that" (triple uptick), "I'm not a lawbreaker" (double-quadruple uptick and handclap, praise the lord at the same time, while a ham bakes in the oven) responses.<wry grin>
Seriously, though, I thought it was that MR didn't allow that kind of conversation.
As for cancelling cable, yeah, I did that right after I bought my first ATV, a gen 1 version. I gave that gen 1 to a friend, and now I enjoy my jailbroken gen 2. My mother bought a gen 2, and recently I convinced her to sell it on eBay and upgrade to a gen 3 - she did it, and pocketed the difference (she didn't need a jailbroken device). She hasn't cancelled her satellite, but she did manage to cut a big chunk of her bill out by cancelling some channels - at the same time she subscribed to Netflix, but still pays less than she was paying.
Sports (basketball and NFL)are my main issue. If I could legally get them outside of satellite/cable, I would probably drop satellite. Most of the other shows I watch are on the networks and I could probably just record them and dump them into iTunes and access them via AppleTVs.
If I was not a sports fan, I wouldn't hesitate to get rid of satellite.
If I was not a sports fan, I wouldn't hesitate to get rid of satellite.
a combo of nba league pass as well as nfl gamepass will do the trick for you (assuming you have an idevice)
I live in Austin and would like to watch the spurs next season using NBA league pass once I cut the cord. Do you think this will be a problem? Worried about blackouts. We have an iPad & iPhones.
im in canada, many of the heat games that i watch and ALL of these playoffs are blackout for me, i use hotspot shield and turn on the vpn on my ipad and blackouts are gone.
Does the NBA league pass include the playoffs? I will look into the NFL game pass. I have never heard of it. Is it the same as Sunday Ticket?
same thing, the app is uk itunes only though so you will need to create a uk account to download, nba has a tier with playoffs and one without
Nice. I'll give this a shot next season. Thanks for the help.
On a side note, that's terrible that you're blacked out even in Canada.
Nope, I'm still connected.
I have something like 130 premium HD movie stations (no commercials). Several thousand free HD On Demand films, and a similar number of pay-per-view titles.
I know it's just so 1990's, but I'm very happy with it.
And how much do you pay monthly?
We cancelled our cable over 2 years ago and haven't once regretted it. We started out by using a couple of Roku boxes and an antenna, but found that Roku didn't integrate very well with our network, the content hosted on our local computer or our thumb drives, and our iTunes content. Last year I switched to Apple TV for our living room and hooked a Mac Mini up to the big TV in the man cave, and I feel like that has been a more complete experience.
Roku does boast a lot of "channels" but those are basically just video clips from websites. You can get these same "channels" by simply going to that site on an iOS device and Airplaying it to the Apple TV. Plus, since we don't subscribe to cable, we have no problem subscribing to a couple of shows on iTunes, and when you do that the Apple TV works almost like a DVR. We are also big users of both Netflix and HuluPlus
It's kind of like homemade ala carte cable. We buy only the shows and services we want without having to subscribe to a monthly cable package. We aren't missing out on any of the shows we used to watch and are saving between $500 and $700 a year depending on how much we buy on iTunes.
Sports is a little trickier. We get most of the NFL games we want to watch over the air in HD, but baseball is more of a pain in the butt. I'm thinking of subscribing to MLB.TV next year and using Foxy Proxy on Firefox to get around the blackout policy, but it's hard to decide if you're actually going to watch that much baseball or not.
Roku does boast a lot of "channels" but those are basically just video clips from websites. You can get these same "channels" by simply going to that site on an iOS device and Airplaying it to the Apple TV. Plus, since we don't subscribe to cable, we have no problem subscribing to a couple of shows on iTunes, and when you do that the Apple TV works almost like a DVR. We are also big users of both Netflix and HuluPlus
It's kind of like homemade ala carte cable. We buy only the shows and services we want without having to subscribe to a monthly cable package. We aren't missing out on any of the shows we used to watch and are saving between $500 and $700 a year depending on how much we buy on iTunes.
Sports is a little trickier. We get most of the NFL games we want to watch over the air in HD, but baseball is more of a pain in the butt. I'm thinking of subscribing to MLB.TV next year and using Foxy Proxy on Firefox to get around the blackout policy, but it's hard to decide if you're actually going to watch that much baseball or not.
The TV is bundled in with my digital land line phone (yes, I still have a land line phone
) and my internet connection. But a reasonable guess would be about $110-$125/month for the TV. It is Verizon Fios service, so all the cabling up to the house connection is fiber optic. So the TV reception is fantastic.How do you do this? Do you need a UK address or does iTunes just let you do this with no questions asked?
What does the NBA and NFL cost?
Do they show playoff games of the NBA and NFL? I don't think the US version of NBA League Pass works with playoff games, which is mainly what I want to see.
you can just create an account through itunes, i have a canadian, american, and uk account, for different apps. i beleive they are each around 100$. playoff games are there, you may have to circumvent a blackout, i use nba international league pass, which may also prove to be a better solution for americans as there are not restrictions really compared to your version of it
Thanks for the info. I will look into it.
If this is a legal way around the sports issue, I will most likely drop Directv. I am just not sure if this is legal at this point, though. However, I do plan on researching it.
There is nothing illegal about using a proxy.
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Because I have a feeling less and less people are doing that these days. Torrents can get you in big trouble with your ISP, especially if they're enforcing a data cap. Since we stream most of our shows on HuluPlus and Netflix, I imagine we eat up a big chunk of the unofficial 300 GB data cap that Comcast allows before you get a warning.
I'm expecting my first warning this month because of the combination of streaming video and the fact that I set up Backblaze to back up 154 GB of data offsite and had to upload all of it to their servers.
The only way to get around the cap on Comcast is to pay for a business class account, but they still watch traffic for people using torrent sites.
I cut the cable about a year and a half ago and haven't looked back. OTA with a couple of Mohu Leaf antennas and combinations of Smart TV, Roku and Apple TV give me all I need.
When I first got my Apple TV, they didn't have Hulu+ yet, so I needed the Roku box. I sure with Apple would add Amazon Instant Video to Apple TV, to give me even more selection.
The big win is being able to buy seasons of cable shows we liked on iTunes, for the current season or shows that aren't on Netflix, Hulu. Just pay for the stuff we actually watch. TV ala carte, the way it should be.
I also love being able to use AirPlay from my iPad, iPhone and iMac to the TV.
When I first got my Apple TV, they didn't have Hulu+ yet, so I needed the Roku box. I sure with Apple would add Amazon Instant Video to Apple TV, to give me even more selection.
The big win is being able to buy seasons of cable shows we liked on iTunes, for the current season or shows that aren't on Netflix, Hulu. Just pay for the stuff we actually watch. TV ala carte, the way it should be.
I also love being able to use AirPlay from my iPad, iPhone and iMac to the TV.
Not expensive at all. I buy TV show seasons when they are on sale. I bought every season of 30 Rock for $19.99 in HD, every season of Everybody Loves Raymond for $14.99 in HD, every season of Psych for $14.99 in HD and so on.
I watch all the shows I watch so many times each year I can't even keep track. I love the shows I buy.
Even bought every season of Parks and Recreation for under $20 for HD.
Edit: The post I quoted has now been deleted.
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