Ditching cable...

... I think ...

Every month, I look at the cable bill and think I don't need it. A friend posted this link on his Facebook page and I checked it out.

CancelCable.com

He is a single guy that, presumably, only has one television. He has no children.

I am married and have children. I have six televisions in my house, although I only regularly use three of them for general viewing. Only one is HD - a 51" rear-projection, with no tuner at all, in the basement. The other two are a 32" CRT (upstairs playroom) and 23" CRT (downstairs living room). The 23" has a Wii with it. The 51" has an original Xbox with XBMC on it. None of them have a digital tuner.

I currently have Comcast cable. I have direct coax for each of the TVs, except for the 51". It has a Comcast HD DVR attached to it. Overall, I've been fine with Comcast's service and channel offerings. It's the price that I'm getting tired of. I looked at satellite and it's not much different.

So, why now? Well, Comcast is in the process of going all digital. I stuck with them all these years because I could hook a coax into any regular TV and get service - no box, no extra cost. This is about to end. Now, I have to either have a digital tuner or one of their converter boxes for each TV. They will give me two at no additional cost, but I have to pay more for my other TVs. I have zero TVs with a digital tuner. This is not the end of the world, but it's been enough of a push to get me off my butt to investigate the ideas in the above website.

I decided to experiment this past week with the 32". This is because a couple of months ago, I had fitted one of my PCs with a digital TV card (Hauppauge HVR-1250 - $50) and a video card with an S-Video out (NVidia GeForce 9400 GT - $50). Using Vista Media Center, I was watching digital cable, including HD, on my TV as a second monitor. There were a lot of logistical problems though with video, remote, mouse, and sound. It worked ok if nobody was on the computer, but it got ugly when they were.

Having this hardware already gave me the perfect opportunity to sample what the website suggests, which is to use digital over-the-air and a Roku box. I simulated the Roku box with Media Center. I decided that the PC needed to be dedicated to avoid my initial problems. I had a third PC downstairs that I wasn't really using. It was a "throw-away" from my mom when she bought a new one. I brought it upstairs and moved the video and TV card into it. It only had Windows XP on it however. All of the new, cool Windows Media Center stuff seemed to be focused on the Windows 7 Media Center. I have a friend at work that was able to hook me up with Windows 7, so I installed it.

I bought a digital antenna ($20 at Wal-Mart) and attached it to the digital tuner. I signed up for a trial Netflix membership. Since Hulu is another biggee, I added it though a software called PlayOn. PlayOn allows streaming of Hulu and Netflix (among others) to various devices. There is a WMC add-on called PlayIt for PlayOn. It also allows my Wii and XMBC on XBox to play Hulu and Netflix on the other TVs.

I've been in test mode for the last day. I'm cautiously optimistic. The Wii's graphics are a little weak and I haven't tested XBMC yet. On WMC though, it's fantastic.

So far, the overall negatives are:

- Can't just sit and channel surf. You can with the locals, but that's pretty limited.
- It's not as simple as sitting and turning on the remote.
- I'm not using a uniform interface. That means it's different for each TV.
- I haven't solved the "most watched" cable channels: ESPN, Disney, and Nickolodeon.
- Tolerance for TV being down if the Internet is down will be interesting.

... more to come!