2 Cool Fishing Forum banner

Cutting the cord - Dropping Cable/Satellite

73K views 223 replies 75 participants last post by  Waterdawg19 
#1 ·
I have seen a few threads about dropping cable/satellite but most were people asking for advice. I decided to move forward with that project and figured I would document it, answer a few questions and maybe learn a few things from the community. I will try to set this up so you can scan through for the important parts (look for summary notes) if you don't want to read everything.

First, I have satellite. The cost is roughly $100/month or $1200/yr. I have a house in Spring and a Lake House and was able to use one account with extra receivers for both houses. This cut the cost almost in half over using cable at both places.

The biggest issue I have is the cost. My wife and I watch roughly 10 channels so the cost comes out to roughly $10/channel per month plus you are forced to watch commercials on top of that. From a programming standpoint, there isn't a lot on TV that is worth the money and we are forced to subsidize programs that most of us on this forum probably object to (Find FSTV and watch it a while to see what I mean).

I have hi-speed internet (15 mbs) since I work from home and own my modem (savings of $8/month, modem cost under $70). I bought a new router that is better suited for streaming ($120) and sent my old one to my lake house. I have one Web enabled flat screen TV, one old tube type and one non-web enabled flat screen in Spring.

To start the project, I started streaming content to my web enabled TV. Most of it was off of you tube but I didn't have any slow downs. I was happy enough with this to move to step two - removing satellite from one TV. I purchased the RCA digital antenna ($32) and was able to pull in 38 channels from Houston. After deleting the channels with poor signals and the Spanish channels, I was left with roughly 20 channels. I do get the major networks.

I also bought an Apple TV. For those of you that don't know, Apple TV is a 3" x 3" box that allows you to access content from the internet on a non-web enabled TV. You have three choices here if you want to do more research, Apple TV ($90), Roku ($90) and Google Chromecast ($35). Of three, Apple Tv and Roku are close in performance, with Roku usually getting the nod. I went with Apple because I have an iPad and iPhone and you can mirror you screen and use it for a remote.

Summary 1: My web enabled TV worked well watching movies off the internet so I bought an Apple TV and digital antenna for a non-web enabled TV to start an extended test.
 
See less See more
#216 ·
The files show you the size and the resolution. You can see varying file sizes for the same resolution. You can also experiment with different resolutions. It is hard to tell the difference between resolutions above 360p, so try a few sometime. If you aren't exceeding your data or not having buffering issues, it probably doesn't matter in your case.
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top