Television Service Checklist

: Image by ronin691 via Flickr

Continuing our series on this topic is this checklist we’ve made up. Recently, there has been a slew of mainstream articles on people downgrading or cancelling their cable or satellite service in favor of alternatives. CNET reported on a family who dumped their satellite service.

Break out a lineup of channels you currently receive, or could receive with your cable provider. We did it for ours in a previous post.
Make a list of channels you actually watch.
- What percentage of the channels that you are paying for do you actually watch?
- Can you justify paying for it if you only watch a small percentage?
If most of your content is on local stations, do you get good enough reception with an antenna and a digital TV and/or converter box?
Out of those non-local stations that you watch, identify programs that you watch religiously
- Check to see if these programs can be found online for free or for individual purchase
  - Hulu, Joost, Fancast, Youtube, Sling and the website of the actual network may offer free content. Right now, these sites have limited commercial interruptions, but as their popularity increases and the popularity of cable decreases, they may have to make up the ad revenue with more ads.
  - Netflix offers some TV content online as well as box sets through their mail program, and since many people adopt it as a TV/Premium Cable alternative, why not try it?
  - iTunes – Apple offers episode download for around $1.99 for SD, $2.99 for HD per episode, season passes available, as well as movies for varying prices. We’re not a big fan of iTunes. We find it too restrictive.Â But for the shows you can’t find elsewhere and can’t live without…
  - An alternative to iTunes, as we continue our issues with the restrictive nature of Apple, is Amazon’s Unbox/Video on Demand store. They offer a downloadable player for Windows systems and a streaming flash player(which should work, even on Linux. They offer more downloadable movies than iTunes. They offer TV series from US networks, BBC, MTV, Bravo, etc.
  - Another alternative is Cinemanow. All three have the same basic pricing structure.
  - If there is anything that we’ve learned from our explorations, if you are addicted to the news, you won’t have any problem finding video content from various sources.
- An important question, mirrored recently by TVSquad.com, is if you feel ready to adopt the cable-free lifestyle? Check out some of the comments on that post. It isn’t for everyone.
- Torrenting – For TV sharing and such, it is usually illegal to download shows via torrent. Torrent has many legitimate uses(we use it for downloading Linux OS release CD/DVDs), but if you intend to engage in video piracy, that is a strategy, but you’re on your own.
- Hardware
  - We’re assuming you want to watch your TV-like content in a TV-like manner. Those of you willing to peer at a laptop or computer screen and watch things probably need very little.
  - Computers
    - Not every old computer has the horsepower to become a media computer. If you are watching high-definition or blu-ray, you need a little more horsepower, although a lot less than if you are a gamer. Gamers wishing to use their media computer to game should increase their needs accordingly.
    - You can get a prebuilt Home Theater PC(HTPC) from various vendors. We may have more on this at some point, but we prefer to build.
    - If you want Blu-Ray support in your HTPC, Linux has limited support for it right now. You can always, if you go the open-source route, wait till it comes, if ever, and upgrade.
    - If you want to add in digital broadcast, you need a digital capture card. Hauppauge is the King of such cards, but they are hardly the only good company out there in this field.
    - If you want to output to a TV, you need one or both of the following: A computer with a TV out or a television with a computer input. The highest standard for TV right now is HDMI, which some computers do offer as an output option. It combines video and sound digitally in the same cable. If you have a DVI output on your computer, it can be converted to HDMI to carry video only. Some TVs have RGB inputs, and if your TV only has analog inputs, you’ll need a computer that can output to that to hook things up.
    - Remote Control – Some digital tuner cards come with remotes, but you can also buy a Media Center remote separately. This is a remote with a USB receiver that works with a computer.
    - An alternative/supplement to this is a wireless keyboard/mouse. Not everything, as we’ve complained, can be easily navigated with a remote control…websites for example.
- Bandwidth – If you are doing all this streaming, make sure your internet connection can handle it. We would suggest no less than 3000KBps down.
- Quality – Some things are not at quite the quality they’d be if on TV, especially HD programming. But bear in mind two things:
  - It’s getting there…if slowly. More and more HD content is coming online.
  - You can use your savings to buy or rent the box sets when they are released. of those series you just want more of. Face it, only a percentage of programming is worth watching twice. For that matter, only a small percentage is worth watching once. A small percentage of a small percentage…how many programs is that?

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