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who has switched from cable/sat to OTA?

N

nopedals

test
I did this a few months ago; I am still tweaking the setup.

Funny thing, part of the reason I did it was that I was watching too much TV. Now I watch at least as much.

First, of course, I save 1K a year by dumping directv. This gave me the elbow room to spend a little dough on the new setup.

Antennas are pretty cheap; that set me back $50. There is no such thing as an "HD" antenna; you just shop for something that gives you VHF and UHF.

My TV does not have an HD tuner, and I am pretty addicted to the DVR. Both bases were covered by picking up a channel master DVRpal, which also plucks a channel grid out of the air. Not cheap -- $350 -- but dumping directv means I am playing with house money.

The PQ looks excellent on all channels. An interesting bonus; I get three PBS feeds off the same channel; if you like PBS programming, that means that something good is almost always on. My other favorite channel is retro TV:

http://www.myretrotv.com/shows.html

They have about 100 affiliates, so you should get it almost anywhere.

The blue ray player is hooked to my DSL router. So I get youtube and pandora for free. I decided to add netflix instant play for 8 bucks a month; well worth it.

I bought a gadget that allows you to play whatever is on your laptop on the TV. I think I should have done the HDMI version of that; PQ is not great (watchable, though). That gives me ESPN3 and Hulu (better PQ on the laptop, though).

No news channels or ESPN sports center. Empty calories for me, but YMMV.

Very happy with the switch.
 
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nopedals said:
I did this a few months ago; I am still tweaking the setup.

Funny thing, part of the reason I did it was that I was watching too much TV. Now I watch at least as much.

First, of course, I save 1K a year by dumping directv. This gave me the elbow room to spend a little dough on the new setup.

Antennas are pretty cheap; that set me back $50. There is no such thing as an "HD" antenna; you just shop for something that gives you VHF and UHF.

My TV does not have an HD tuner, and I am pretty addicted to the DVR. Both bases were covered by picking up a channel master DVRpal, which also plucks a channel grid out of the air. Not cheap -- $350 -- but dumping directv means I am playing with house money.

The PQ looks excellent on all channels. An interesting bonus; I get three PBS feeds off the same channel; if you like PBS programming, that means that something good is almost always on. My other favorite channel is retro TV:

http://www.myretrotv.com/shows.html

They have about 100 affiliates, so you should get it almost anywhere.

The blue ray player is hooked to my DSL router. So I get youtube and pandora for free. I decided to add netflix instant play for 8 bucks a month; well worth it.

I bought a gadget that allows you to play whatever is on your laptop on the TV. I think I should have done the HDMI version of that; PQ is not great (watchable, though). That gives me ESPN3 and Hulu (better PQ on the laptop, though).

No news channels or ESPN sports center. Empty calories for me, but YMMV.

Very happy with the switch.
Click to expand...

I definitely want to ditch cable... problem is my GF :no:
I am trying to find a solution that will let me get rid of it. Her most watched channels are: hgtv, food network, mtv, liftime (biggest one), disney , nick , and abc family.
She says she likes the randomness of turning it on and just having shows on or a lifetime movie , etc. Any way I can get these channels with the internet or without cable? Can be a paid service as long as it is cheaper than just having cable. I signed up for a free trial of hulu plus and it is pretty nice has a lot of shows I watch but nothing mentioned.
 
If you're still getting cable internet, see what you can get if you plug the cable directly into the digital cable tuner (or check http://www.silicondust.com/support/channels/).
You usually will only get the locals, but you might get a few other random channels too.
With the SiliconDust tuner, I use my HTPC as a DVR for what I'm able to get unencrypted. And with it being a full-fledged PC, I'm able to stream anything available via the web too.
 
Yeah...I'd like to, but there's only like three, maybe four, OTA channels here and that just won't cut it for me. Didn't buy a HDTV to watch the evening news. :)
 
A few years ago, my mom sold her house and moved into a coop apt. No antennas allowed. Only option was cable. Before signing up, I hooked her tv into the existing cable jack. Holy cow, the cable company never turned it off when the previous owner left. She ended up with free cable for two years before it was finally disconnected.
 
We dumped cable TV and just skipped OTA altogether. All that we are interested in viewing, can be streamed from the network websites and/or netflix.:smoke:
 
We dropped dish over 3 years ago when our first child was born. I placed a large antenna in our attic and feed directly into the living room plasma (which has HD tuner built in) and into a used Sony DirectTV receiver I bought for $5 (which also has an HD Tuner) in the basement for the projector. We've been pretty happy with it - great HD picture and sound quality. I have recently subscribed to HuluPlus which I can stream through my new Sony Blu-ray players. I figure I've saved around 3K so far.
 
I've been on OTA + Windows Media Center (DVR for OTA + Netflix player) for the last 5 years or so. I've never missed cable TV and don't think I ever will with all that's available now.

jblnut
 
Since getting Netfilx just this month I hve thought about getting rid of DishNetwork. I've watched way more streaming content that dish. I live downtown with a clear view south (where the stations broadcast relative to me) so with a little aluminum foil and cardboard DIY anttena I built from online instructions I get 128 channels, of course I would only ever watch about 20 of them, still the reception and picture quality is perfect and free, I may dump the dish and build a HTPC to act as a DVR. I would miss alot of NBA action...maybe I am not ready to dump the dish!
 
Got rid of cable TV 1.5 years ago and it's been great. I ran Ethernet throughout my house and set up a media server with dual tuners, connected to a TV antenna in the attic. Using MediaPortal, the server streams live TV, recorded TV, music, movies and videos anywhere in the house. My HTPC in the living room plays any of the content from the server and also can stream from Netflix, hulu, youtube, pandora, whatever.

I do miss ESPN and The Daily Show, and that may eventually bring me back as a cable subscriber, but otherwise I have not missed it at all.
 
Got rid of Dish about a year ago. It took some tweaking, but I finally got the antenna dialed in. Now I get HD for free.
My big concern in dropping Dish was I would not get Fox News anymore. But I can listen to it on my Sirius satellite radio, so I went ahead and cancelled Dish.
 
Always OTA over here. I will never get cable or satellite TV. Heard too many horror stores. I do like Mythbusters and Dirty jobs on Discovery, but I can view the complete collections at the local library. I was thinking of joining Netflix for $8 a month and hookup the laptop to my TV.
 
We're weaning ourselves off Dish Network. We did a survey of what we watch compared to what we were paying for and drastically cut our package.

We already have OTA with the sat box as our receiver. I've got a spare computer I'm going to upgrade into a DVR. We've got Netflix, but being so far from our slick our DSL is too slow to allow streaming.

Between snail mail Netflix and OTA we'll be set. The only thing we'll give up is HGTV and ESPN. I do have an analog SD TV upstairs in the living room with a coax run. I'm trying to find a workaround for that if we go OTA. I guess I could split the incoming antenna coax and run it upstairs and upgrade the TV to a new small flat screen.
 
tiga said:
We dropped dish over 3 years ago when our first child was born. I placed a large antenna in our attic and feed directly into the living room plasma (which has HD tuner built in) and into a used Sony DirectTV receiver I bought for $5 (which also has an HD Tuner) in the basement for the projector. We've been pretty happy with it - great HD picture and sound quality. I have recently subscribed to HuluPlus which I can stream through my new Sony Blu-ray players. I figure I've saved around 3K so far.
Click to expand...
+1 on the antenna. I can't recall how long ago I ditched satellite. With my outdoor UHF antenna from RS, an old rabbit ear connected directly to the UHF terminals and then an RS booster for good measure. I get solid reception of 16 UHF signals and 16 HD (14 solid and stable). For just about everything else we use either Netflix or Hulu. Thinking about Huluplus since it works with PS3 also.

We have saved hundreds of dollars to be sure.

Now, the tricks. There are 3 styles of VHF antenna. The rabbit ears were tried as a result of a YouTube video. However, first they must be out flat, not in a "V" at all. Second they must NOT be fully extended! This last part is critical. Lower bands require the rods be extended further out than the upper bands, of VHF. There's a link to, which I inadvertently whiped out, that has the proper lenghts. Back to types, one is 2-13, another is 2-6 and another is 7-13, the latter two called "cut to band" antenna for specific channels. Using http://www.antennaweb.org/aw/welcome.aspx you can find out more about what channels are broadcast in your area, what direction to point to and the strength of antenna you'll need.

I'll be upgrading to a 7-13 unit to help collect a stronger signal, hopefully in time for the superbowl.
 
Been living here for a year. When I moved in, I plugged it in and had cable. Unfortunately, the Comcast scrambles all the channels except local:thumbsdn: Oh well, at least I get free local HD. Now if I can only get a cable box that can decode the signal...:scratch2:
 
We dumped cable 20 years ago. OTA for us. We live about 35 miles N of DC and 30 W of Baltimore. Roof top large antenna $130 with programmable rotator and an RF amp for an additional 20-30dB amplification to feed a passive split for TV tuner, FM tuner and DTV converter for our VCR.
We get all the broadcast signals from commercial and public, probably 25 stations with some duplication, eg., Network shows from NBC are the same from DC or Baltimore, only local news is different. However, sometimes DC doesn't come in so well, then we switch to Baltimore to watch the show.
Overall, reasonably happy. Music CD, DVD and BD are the real quality fun!
 
I ditched cable about 7 months ago. I just wasn't watching much on it, plus they decided to block all of the clear-QAM channels. I have an antenna in my attic, and get about 30 channels. That's more than enough for me.
Jack
 
I'm trying to make the transition.

Still have SD satellite because I only had tube tv's at the time and we got a cheap package deal. Now I have some plasmas. 50" screen and under SD satellite isn't bad. Since it looks good enough to my wife, and DVR is easy, satellite hasn't been dropped...yet.

However, OTA has stopped us from going to HD satellite. The mancave has a 63" plasma and SD satellite doesn't cut it at that size. Made one of those "improved coat hanger antenna" and have it in the attic with signal amplifier. Get to watch my local channels (most of the shows I watch), news, and plenty of sports in HD. At this point I just can't justify paying more for HD-sat. I'm almost ready to get an OTA DVR.

I also recently started using Hulu desktop on the tv. Not HD, but better than the SD satellite. Between OTA, computer, dvd, and blu-ray...I feel as if I've dropped satellite in at least one room. Now I've got to work on the rest of the house. :)
 
I ditched the high price of cable about 3 years ago and have never looked back. I get my video entertainment OTA and from Netflix. I have no plans to go back to cable.
 
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