Thinking of ditching my cable for a WD TV or Roku box and Hulu Plus

[inactive]

Anyone have any experience or thoughts on this?

 

[TCummings]

Did it and we are back to cable now. There aren't enough shows on Hulu, there should be more but there just arent. If you enjoy Anime you will love it though.

 

[flatwins]

I'm ditching all cable\satellite\etc. (other than internet) in May when my contract is up so I'm interested in this sort of thing. Already have an Apple TV box.

 

[kd5rjz]

Yeah, it's sad how full of anime Hulu and Crackle are, lol.

We've got the Sony network media players on all of our TV's while I try to convince the wife to let me dump cable. I download most of what I watch anyways...

 

[inactive]

I'll expand a bit.

All I generally watch are network shows. Maybe a bit on A&E (first 48) and Food Network (Chopped). My wife watches those plus the crap they put on Bravo. My son watches a few shows on PBS which is over the air anyway. We very rarely watch anything live, as we use On Demand or the DVR.

I guess my bigger question is how well does it all work together? Is the picture, etc as good as cable on a 1080 tv (I know over the air will be) ? Is there any specific content that is largely missed by Hulu subscribers (i.e. any big name channels or programs not available on there? Any of you get content of of Usenet versus steaming it live?

I could shave about 110 bucks off my bill every month ditching cable and just sticking with the internet so I think I am going to do it. But I welcome everyone's feedback Thanks.

 

[soonerwings]

I ditched cable over a year ago in favor of a mac mini (HDMI out to the TV) over a year ago and I haven't looked back. Just about everything I watch is eventually put on the network website that originally aired the program. Sometimes it's the next day, sometimes it takes a month or so. If you can't wait a month for it to show up, you can always find what you're looking for on a torrent site. I've found several series on Netflix streaming that I missed the first time around. Currently, I'm on season 5 of Numb3rs.

At first, I thought I'd miss a ton of college football, but ESPN 3 really has a lot of games online.

 

[inactive]

I had a mac mini and used it on the TV quite a but, but sold it several years back (it was a dated model and I got over 50% back of the retail cost).

You pretty much have me convinced. Given I had forgotten about ESPN3, and over the air broadcasts, Network websites, and 8 bucks a month for Hulu Plus, I am going to pul the trigger.

Next is climbing in my attic and stting if my monster dinosaur antenna gets good HD reception (I heard that often they do) so I can get OETA and local news. That is step one.

 

[soonerwings]

If you live within 20-30 miles of your broadcasting stations with a decent line of sight, you could probably get by with one of those flat indoor antennas. When I lived near the metro, I had one made by Terk that worked quite well. Now that I'm in a more rural setting, the outdoor antenna is the only way to go. I could go with attic mount, but my attic is tiny and installing one up there would be a pain.

 

[inactive]

I have an existing antenna in the attic, but it is likely as old as the house (1962). The advantage is 1) I could use it for both TVs in the home (I only recently became a 2 TV household), and 2) it's there, so its free and I'm cheap.

The disadvantage is that I am lazy, and paying for a new flat indoor antenna (edit: not intenna - wow) sounds easier than crawling in my unfinished attic and routing cable. It also is old school, and the one in wall antenna outlet in the house looks like nothing I've seen. It is basically the just the top half (3 holes) of this:

I could probably somehow hook it up to some coax and make it work, but it would take some studying.

 

[MaddSkillz]

Why is cable so ridiculously expensive? I checked with my assistant one time to see how much stuff was I was paying for and couldn't believe it.