Lets Dump Cable!
My cable bill is one hundred and fifty dollars per month. According to Sally Struthers, that could feed a hungry child in Bangladesh for like... three years. My problem with this is that (a) I'm never home to watch it, and (b) when I am able, there's nothing worth watching on TV. There's a reason that channel surfing is an American past time - there's nothing worthy of focusing our attention. In the early 90's, Bruce Springsteen wrote a terrible song (why do we call him "The Boss" again?) called "57 Channels and Nothing On." Since then, we've more than quadrupled the number of channels, and there's still nothing on.
I will not waste my money any longer. This is about my plan. Briefly it goes like this...
HD TV
In the good ol' days, getting your TV meant buying a pair of 'rabbit ear' antennas and watching either ABC, NBC or CBS. This was free. However, the programming was limited, and if you weren't within 50 miles of a major market, you didn't get much reception. In rural areas, Cable TV was the delivery method. And to make it worthwhile, there were extra channels. I remember that in 1984 I had 35 channels including MTV, CNN and Nickelodeon. Back then, cable was about $20 per month. Expensive, but doable. Given the alternative, cable quickly became the leading option for television entertainment, and the antenna became passe. Then something happened. HDTV.
HDTV is actually better by antenna; cable can only deliver about 6mb/s of bandwidth. But a UHF signal over-the-air can deliver nearly 60 mb/s of bandwidth, which is more than enough to provide true HD quality. The only other option is a Blue Ray / HD DVD. If you subscribe to cable, you cannot get true 1080 resolution HDTV. If you have satellite you can, but you will be paying a lot for it. Flash back to the good old yagi antenna we used to mount on our houses to get VHF and UHF TV broadcasts; an antenna you may already have is sufficient to receive high quality HD broadcasts from local stations for free. If you don't have one, you can get an antenna for about $60.
You'll also need a TV capable of receiving HD digital broadcasts. The standard for these broadcasts in the us is called ATSC - as opposed to the old NTSC standard. But if you have a TV which is not digital ready, you can purchase a converter box for as little as $50.
Internet TV
A remarkable revolution has occurred in the last ten years, particularly in the past 5. The ability to deliver high quality video content over the internet has emerged. There are sites like YouTube, BrietbartTV, Break.com, Vimeo and more which serve up user-created content. If you want access to movies and hit televisions shows, you can download them from Apple's iTunes store, Hulu or Amazon On Demand. And the new standard for DVD rental, NetFlix, offers streaming options for over-the-internet delivery of premium content.
DVD
I remember when DVD's first became available to the average consumer. A DVD player might cost hundreds of dollars. Today, I paid $30 for one at WalMart. Again, you can either own or rent DVD's to play.
My Plan
So here goes: for live broadcast entertainment, I've purchased a high gain antenna and an HD converter. I have a subscription to NetFlix and can stream certain movies from netflix as well as purchase other shows via Amazon OnDemand. In order to stream this content to my TV, I have purchased the Roku player. Since my cable provider will not allow me to have high-speed cable internet without also having cable TV, I am switching to DSL.
Since this is an experiment, I will keep you - my faithful audience - apprised of my progress.