I've written before about how we were going to burn our TV. We since (the day after I wrote that post, in fact) have cut the cord. There is no more TV service coming into the house. What have we done? How have we fared? I'll explain.
We started with the Fios triple-play service: TV, Phone, Internet. We dropped everything but the internet. We've switched to using our cell phones only and a Google Voice number. The TV connection is a bit more complex.
I didn't want to lose TV altogether, since there are a few shows that we watch regularly. Thankfully, a combination of a lot of Netflix, a bit of Amazon Prime, and very little Hulu have given us the random zone-out TV that we sometimes need to decompress. For shows that we like to watch, there's some downloading involved, but these days, there's a reasonable amount of live TV through the use of technology.
I used Kickstarter to obtain a Simple.tv, which is a device that tunes live, over-the-air TV and records it to an attached hard drive. The video can be streamed "live" from that drive over the network to any computer in the house with a Silverlight player. It can also be played on either the Roku 2 XS on the family room TV, or on the old Roku in the bedroom. I think there's even a third Roku in a box somewhere in my office that's destined for the basement TV.
I'm not completely sold on the Roku -- it feels too simple. Too few buttons. Too few controls. Too simple a setup. Maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe simple is good. The XS' RF remote is a little disconcerting, but I'm getting used to it.
In any case, it works. Like TV streams from the Simple.TV to the Rokus without issue. And the single Roku device can stream Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon video, along with the Simple.TV streaming. That's pretty nice. And the picture remains HD-clear.
That's the one thing that the cable and satellite providers won't tell you. All of their signals are compressed. All of them. When you get your "HD" signal over cable, it's already been compressed and has artifacts. Worse, depending on how the station's compression is tuned by the cable company, the compression could be higher than normal, resulting in a more jaggy, pixelated video. With over-the-air TV, the signal is not compressed. It's full HD all the time from every station. It always looks fantastic. Such a huge win. When I watch live TV, people comment on how clear my picture looks -- This is why.
As for stations, we pull in 17 digital stations over the air. A handful of them are some dude reading excerpts from the Bible dubbed over a photo of a flowing field of grain or something -- not very entertaining. But we get a decent set of network feeds over the air. What we don't get is channel 6 (WPVI), our ABC affiliate, or channel 12 (WHYY), the local PBS station. These are large holes in our over-the-air TV programming, since no other channels cover their programs.
The apparent reason why we don't get these stations is that they're broadcast on VHF frequencies instead of UHF frequencies like all the other stations. As a result, there is a significant amount of interference and a low transmission distance. They also require a separate antenna to receive, which we don't have. It's not a complicated or expensive antenna, but it's extra and I haven't tried it yet. Our new antenna has better reception that the Mohu Leaf antenna we were using. (Roku? Mohu? Weird.) It's some cheap $50 thing I got from eBay, a "Super Active and Rotating Antenna". Whatever, it works well enough.
I have not yet put the antenna in the eave. It's currently in our bedroom, sitting on the treadmill (yes, it gets a lot of use, shut up). I intend to take the antenna, the Simple.TV, and a wireless bridge and move them to the eave where I can mount them and let them run. They should work just fine unattended.
I also grabbed an Equiso device via their Kickstarter. It's a USB-stick computer running Android that plugs into an HDMI port on the TV. The idea is that we could use that to play back the Simple.TV video, but it can't play Silverlight. It also looks like the device overheated and melted after about an hour's use, so it's really not ready for prime time viewing.
So that's how things stand with TV for the moment. I don't expect to be going back to cable or satellite. I hope I can bring in the ABC and PBS stations with an additional antenna, but I'm not really watching so much of their TV that this would send me back to cable.
