So it's been about 2 weeks since the wife and I cut the cord to our Satellite provider. While it is pretty hard to say for sure, I think we are doing quite well with the change. We haven't had any shows come up that we haven't been able to watch either online, or that we can't live without so I take that one in the old win column. One thing that I failed to mention in my previous post was that I also have an Over the Air Digital Antenna. For whatever reason, every time I tell someone that I have one of these they go "What is that?" Well I personally bought the TERK HDTVa Amplified Directional Indoor HDTV Antenna. Basically think the old school rabbit ears, only these are capable of picking up FREE digital channels. You can also read that and say that it gets free HD channels. Yep there are signals floating in your house with that HD greatness and it’s all for the grabbing.
Either way, I used www.antennaweb.org to find out the best way to point the antenna. Basically in my house to get the most use of the indoor antenna I need to point the antenna at around 60 degrees. Once I accomplished that and hooked it up to my TV, then let the TV find out which channels were available, I ended up with about 17 channels. This gave me all the normal channels (FOX, ABC, NBC, and CBS) as well as a few obscure ones like PBS, Country music channel, and Speed TV or something like that. The only channel that is giving me grief right now is ABC. And even that channel comes in pretty good.
Here are the caveats of the setup so far. Over the Air HD is all or nothing. Unlike the rabbit ears of old where you could get a snowy signal, with digital you either have a signal capable of producing a signal or you don't. So for instance on ABC there will be times when it blanks. The wife was watching The Bachelor on Monday and every 10 mins or so the screen would go blue for all of 2 secs. Not a huge deal but for some people this could be a deal breaker.
PlayOn and Netflix have been everything and more than what I expected. Hulu is almost a digital DVR, and the Quality more than meets my expectations. Using PlayOn I have my Hulu queue set up so that any time a show comes on, if we miss it live over the air, its ready without wading the sea of shows that Hulu has. Oddly enough Jill has found some really great shows that are only on Hulu and Netflix, as they were discontinued and are now DVD only that we never heard of. Some of those are "Dog bites Man", "Better off Ted", and "Parks and Rec" to name a few. While Parks and Rec isn't canceled it allowed us to catch up and we now watch it with everyone else :).
All I can say is that while it is very early in the game as Jill is still in busy season, and I don't really care for TV that much in general, we are coping WAY better than I ever thought we would. The jump was scary, and I never imagined a life without Cable/Satellite, it’s a good time to be going without. Oh and did I mention that this ala carte offering is saving us around $100 a month? Yeah...Cable and Satellite can suck it, I don't need them anymore!
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*EDIT* I fail at spelling
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