cutting the TV cord

RodneyWright · **Posted:** Mon Feb 22, 2016 4:54 pm

OK, I've had it w/ AT&T right up to the top of my receding hair line. Paying too much to start with and they just went up again. As much as it pains me to say this, but TW does offer high speed internet at the house. With higher speed internet options, that should work nicely w/ my netflix and amazon accounts. That said, I'm in need of some TV options. Wife wants to continue public TV, HGTV, cooking and local channels. I'd love to keep velocity, but may have to give that one up.

What are my options for low cost TV w/ some decent channels?

Chris Halweg · **Posted:** Mon Feb 22, 2016 5:01 pm

https://www.sling.com/ and an OTA antenna?

TWC was forced to provide HD with their basic service (or if you split the internet only feed) if you had a QAM tuner on your TV. This was several years ago. I'm not sure if they still do this or not.

Chad Culbertson · **Posted:** Mon Feb 22, 2016 5:18 pm

Chris Halweg wrote:

https://www.sling.com/ and an OTA antenna?

TWC was forced to provide HD with their basic service (or if you split the internet only feed) if you had a QAM tuner on your TV. This was several years ago. I'm not sure if they still do this or not.

I've been using Sling TV for quite some time now. The software can be a bit buggy sometimes, but for the most part is works pretty well for me. The app is much quicker on my Fire TV than my Fire TV stick though. Maybe the newer stick is more powerful, it just takes forever sometimes for the stream to get started. It works fine once it starts playing though.

I have had some issues before with the on demand, if there is a hiccup in the stream i've had it start the show over. Some on demand content you can't fast forward either I guess so they can force you to watch the commericals.

For the most part though it works well enough to be worth the money and they're working on adding local channels. They have ABC now but it's in a $5 broadcast package with just 2 spanish channels so not worth it to me yet. If they get the other locals added though i'll probably add the package.

Ninja Edit: Full quality seems to use about 3.7 Mb/sec while streaming.

RodneyWright · **Posted:** Mon Feb 22, 2016 5:50 pm

just chatted w/ TW and looking at their biz class internet of 50mbps, so a dramatic increase of what I currently have. I'll look at sling and an OTA antenna and see if that meets my needs for now. Thanks for the info so far....

Chad Culbertson · **Posted:** Mon Feb 22, 2016 6:47 pm

RodneyWright wrote:

just chatted w/ TW and looking at their biz class internet of 50mbps, so a dramatic increase of what I currently have. I'll look at sling and an OTA antenna and see if that meets my needs for now. Thanks for the info so far....

Why would you get biz class? I have residential and get 100 down.

Not sure where exactly you live, but if it's close to the raleigh area you could get 300mb down with TW if you wanted.

Jordan Normark · **Posted:** Mon Feb 22, 2016 7:56 pm

We have had rabbit ears for years, no cable, just internet. We get close to 30 channels, 3 or so that I actually watch. For some reason, PBS reception has been poor for the last year or so. Picture quality with rabbit ears is exceptional.

Internet is TWC. The bill has been creeping up lately to $52.63, $10 of which is the leased modem. We got a Firestick a few months ago and use it for Netflix. It works ok most of the time, but pauses to catch up occasionally. I have noticed that the picture quality diminishes sometimes, maybe in an effort to avoid interruption? There seems to be a lot of variation in our connection speed.

Chuck Branscomb · **Posted:** Mon Feb 22, 2016 8:30 pm

RodneyWright wrote:

just chatted w/ TW and looking at their biz class internet of 50mbps, so a dramatic increase of what I currently have. I'll look at sling and an OTA antenna and see if that meets my needs for now. Thanks for the info so far....

It's truly insane the business models of all these TV/Internet companies. I last negotiated with TW a few months ago, was ready to bail, but of course yet another "package" was available, magically. I "had" to upgrade to their ultimate internet (I get about 220M down and 25M up now), but overall lowered the monthly bill by almost $40. Of course you only get this new rate for one year at which time you have to yet again call them up, negotiate, etc, for yet some new package. It's a yearly pia.

Michael Czeiszperger · **Joined:** Thu Apr 09, 2009 9:35 am **Posts:** 861

I've been without cable for 15 years. The whole notion of a "channel" that you have to watch or record from is outdated.

Netflix and Amazon work for anything that's been out a year or more (not to mention their original shows) and Apple TV allows me to buy anything that's currently on. Even paying $25 for a season of a show is still worth it for the lack of commercials and the ability to watch when I want. The end result is I get to watch anything I want for half the price of paying for cable.

But that all ended last month when I moved in with my fiancé, who simply can not live without cable because why take a chance that sports even might not be available? We ended up setting up 2 TV rooms, one with cable and one with Apple TV, which rankles but at least almost everything on Apple TV is free with a cable subscription.

I really tried to go back to cable, but everything about it is irritating: having to know what time a show is broadcast, navigating the horrible user interface on the cable box, and worst of all, spending 1/3 of every hour watching commercials.

The horrible user experience with cable is a direct result of the lack of competition, where despite paying, on average $250/year on cable box rental fees, the technology hasn't changed much in 15 years. Hopefully the FCC will break the cable monopoly just a tiny bit:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/27/10840722/fcc-cable-box-rulemaking-proposal

Steven Carter · **Posted:** Tue Feb 23, 2016 5:02 am

My wife is the master negotiator with AT&T, and she is a self-professed TV-aholic. We actually get our money's worth out of it, because we use it often. DVR, wireless STBs, HD sports...all of it. I think often about how to knock down our telecom bill, and the only thing I come back to is a Leaf HD antenna and a Roku/AppleTV/Fire device. Sports is getting interesting with the evolution of ESPN's app, but is still not quite there yet (I believe you still need to be a cable subscriber to get all the app's benefit).

With Google Fiber and AT&T GigaPower going in the ground locally, the next 18-24 months will provide new (hopefully competitive) alternatives. The FCC ruling at least appears to clear the way for relief from the monthly STB rental costs. That's a start, at least.

Chuck Branscomb · **Posted:** Tue Feb 23, 2016 9:20 am

If I had to have "regular TV" via cable and not use a DVR for everything and anything I want to watch, I would have ditched it long ago. The only time we ever see a commercial is if we decide to watch a sports event as is, but usually we have it recording and just start watching it well into the event (i.e. watching a college basketball game with a delayed start = no commercials, no half time, etc, except catching up to real time near the end so maybe a few commercials). So with the DVR, Netflix and Amazon Prime stuff, we pretty much see zero advertising which I would imagine won't last somehow...

Roger McDaniels · **Posted:** Tue Feb 23, 2016 9:26 am

I switched back to TWC not too long ago after 15 years of DirecTV and love it. I can use a real Tivo again, it doesn't break up when it rains too hard, and my phone costs $10/month. My overall TV, phone, and Internet bill was cut in half from what it was, and that doesn't count what I was paying for NFL Sunday Ticket (I now use NFL Game Pass). I get a premium package so I can have NBCSN for the F1 races, so there are way more channels that I will ever watch.

Andrew Jonell · **Joined:** Mon Mar 23, 2009 6:43 pm **Posts:** 1350

Jordan Normark wrote:

Picture quality with rabbit ears is exceptional.

I can't remember the bitrate, but the OTA standard is like 15 or 20Mbit/s and TWC/Dish/AT&T/whoever compresses the hell out of the local stations. For comparison, Blu-ray tops out at 48Mbit/s and DVDs topped out around 10Mbit/s.

Chad Culbertson · **Posted:** Tue Feb 23, 2016 2:38 pm

Andrew Jonell wrote:

Jordan Normark wrote:

Picture quality with rabbit ears is exceptional.

I can't remember the bitrate, but the OTA standard is like 15 or 20Mbit/s and TWC/Dish/AT&T/whoever compresses the hell out of the local stations. For comparison, Blu-ray tops out at 48Mbit/s and DVDs topped out around 10Mbit/s.

OTA quality was many fold better than HD on TWC's network. I used a digital amplified antenna for some time and it looked fantastic.

As far as pay TV, Dishes video quality was much better than TWC. I'd be hard pressed to pay TWC for their crap again. I have been considering a subscription service again, but it's hard to swallow the price these days. Especially when I consider all those channels I won't be watching and don't want to pay for.

Chris Halweg · **Posted:** Tue Feb 23, 2016 3:35 pm

http://antennaweb.org/

You can check out what channels you can expect to get based on the antenna and direction you point it. I have a roof antenna in my attic. Unfortunately, I have to point it through a hill at the Garner tower, so my signal is decent, but could be better if I had a clear line of sight.

RickyBeam · **Posted:** Tue Feb 23, 2016 6:02 pm

Andrew Jonell wrote:

...TWC/Dish/AT&T/whoever compresses the hell out of the local stations.

8VSB is ~20Mbps.

TWC officially broadcasts exactly what they are handed from the station. ('tho they are legally allowed to encrypt it now.) In most cases, that's exactly what they're sending to the tower. (PBS sends a different set of channels to TWC as they can carry all of the subs 24/7)

Dish, DirecTV, and Uverse all transcode the MPEG2 stream into their own MPEG4 format. The satellite feeds are roughly equivalent. Uverse, however, compresses the ever loving shit out of everything; which is what is required to feed TV through the swizzle stick of DSL.

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