Cable Cutters - Whatcha Go With?

You would be surprised at how much you can get with just a pair of rabbit ears on top of the TV.
 
I would get an Amazon TV if I was you. I don't care about local TV so I have an Amazon Firestick at $39.99 a fantastic deal.

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YouTubeTV, YouTube Red/Google Play Music, Amazon Prime Video, my personal favorite, Filmstruck, and a roof antenna but that's not getting much use.
 
Wildcat said:
Ours offers Internet-only pricing, and the cheapest cable TV option adds $20/month. Plus, once your term is up and you want to renegotiate, you go through the retention department and cut your deal there.
I called WOW on their specials...$89.95 triple play plus Hulu for 6mos and a premium channel,what a friggin scam! By the time they add equipt,taxes etc etc the 89.00 quickly becomes 132.00.There is no disclaimer in the add,just plain deceptive advertising.
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diddlybopper said:
I called WOW on their specials...$89.95 triple play plus Hulu for 6mos and a premium channel,what a friggin scam! By the time they add equipt,taxes etc etc the 89.00 quickly becomes 132.00.There is no disclaimer in the add,just plain deceptive advertising.
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True, but we were talking about cutting the cable here, not signing up for it. ;) I pay WOW a flat fee for Internet only, every month--no extra fees, no taxes, no equipment rental. After my deal is up in a year, I call back and renegotiate.

The terms are on the page where I would select which service area I am in. No different from how others do it--dangle the carrot to get the new business, and any advertised prices are before the extra fees. Only, Wildcat ain't no hungry bunny to want any of their carrots. :D AT&T had plenty of T&Cs on their services, last time I checked, even for Internet-only plans. And being a large corporation, I found them to be very inflexible--no negotiating on price. That's how I ended up back at WOW. Comcast/Xfinity was so impossible to deal with during signup that (as the saying goes) "they are dead to me."
 
We have a smart TV, an LG UH7700. It has bunch of apps included, but only has Audio out. So we got a Tablo(4-tuner) to record over the antenna stuff, the Tablo is a slow, but reliable recorder. I bought a Firestick thinking is was something different from the Amazon included with the television, FYI, it is not. Since the television has networking, we went with SlingTv, Hulu, and HBO. SlingTv has two options, Blue has Fox Sports (your city) and Orange has ESPN. SlingTv has HGTV, AMC, Bravo, TNT, etc, etc.

The Firestick became useful when I found it working when plugged into my Denon receiver instead of the television. To explain that:

In addition to cutting the cord, I made a project of putting all our DVDs and CDs on an external drive. I installed Emby as a media server on the PC the external drive is attached to. The television has an Emby client that allows me to stream movies and music to the television. It was a little bugaboo that when using Emby to listen to music, I had to have the television turned on. Well, there is an Emby client for the Firestick, and since the Firestick works plugged into my receiver, now I only need to turn on the television to load a playlist, once that is starting on the Firestick I can turn off the television. I am still chasing down a solution to take the television out of the music flow. I will get there.
 
Dingman said:
Yup, what Lee said. Here in Des Moines, mediacom essentially has a monopoly, the only other option DirectTv doesn't have good market share as it's slower DSL.

So, I've tried HARD to get a decent straight-up internet connection with no TV, but there's only one and it's the slowest. So you end up paying for "basic cable TV" anyway which is amazingly horrible with both content and signal.

And there has NEVER been a data cap - until now. Mediacom instituted (how do they do that anyway, don't we have a "contract"?) data caps and so now you have to pay more for a high enough data cap to watch all that internet TV at 1080 resolution.

It's a damn scam, free market my azz. What free market?

EDIT: Side note, I actually sent a notice to my boss that I wouldn't be uploading\downloading gigs and gigs worth of databases from home anymore - I was bumping up against the data cap. I'm sure the company appreciates all that free data transfer service - not.
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Does not sound any better than when I lived in Newton Iowa 18 years ago. At that time all I could get was dial up no DSL available at that time.
 
John Ess said:
With the whole fiasco of switching everyone over to digital, Spectrum is really ticking off a lot of people. I'm calling B.S. and went with OTA. This old school design Channelmaster antenna and a new 40" Samsung are getting me through the winter. View attachment 1125432
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I'm using the double version of that one which is working out fabulously. I don't miss cable at all. Even if in the end the savings isn't earth-shattering, I'm spending my entertainment dollars where I want to spend them and not to have 200 channels I'm not interested in watching.
 
John Ess said:
Interesting...I'd definitely go for the design with the screen. If it doesn't work out as planned, this 2 bay version is about $50 on Amazon...and there's a 4 bay version also. Mine is about 30' above ground..I'm in a 3rd floor apartment, and I get 8 channels and all the accompanying sub channels out to about 30-40 miles. Could do better if I felt like putting up a rotor.
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The design is fairly multidirectional according to everything I have read. I bought an antenna and get all the bigs and the sub channels, but the distant two are pixelating.
 
John Ess said:
I agree...stupid wasting the money to receive more and more commercials and a whole bunch of channels that are useless. And I've found this antenna to be a good value..well made and it has enough gain to pull in what I need..although I could find more channels with a rotor and some more height. I can imagine the 4 bay version must work very well.
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My experience is that it's actually no better than the two bay one in quality of signal once attained, but it does bring in more of them. I'm in the same situation even though Miami is flat as a pancake, the large trees all around me cause some interference on the few channels that come in from the west (east?) ..... let's just say from the other side... lol. The 4 bay all but eliminated any digital noise from a weak signal. If I could go up another 10 feet which would put the antenna above the treeline, I would likely get perfect signals on everything. But I'm getting all the locals all the time so I don't have much motivation to get on the roof. :)
 
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