Television. Idiot Box. TV. Attention whore electronic box that lives in most of our living rooms. And I never watch it.
Why have cable
A few years ago I decided not to waste money by having a land line phone and a cell phone at the same time. It was forward thinking when I did it, and now it’s all the rage. I mean really, how many of you have land line telephone service from your local telco? I do mean phone service, not a line that is there for your DSL connection. If you are younger than me, I’m going to say none of you. If you are older, I would say there is a higher chance, but not by much.
Looking again to save a few bucks, I’m thinking about turning off the television part of my Fios service. Honestly I only watch a few shows and seems like a waste to be paying Verizon $45 a month for 8 hours of programming. Then I saw this (via) and realized I wasn’t the only one.
But I have a really nice setup. 45″ HD TV. Full Dolby Surround (with 100w 12″ sub to rattle the walls). To keep that from going to waste, I’m seriously thinking about getting an Apple TV. I’ll buy the shows I want (in HD no less, or whatever the iTunes version of it is) and watch them when I want. I already have a pretty good DVD player for movies and I’m very comfortable using Handbrake for, um, any other programming I might come across, that I want to watch on the big screen.
Plus there is Hulu for when I want to watch Burn Notice, Carrier (which I highly recommend) or anything else that might strike my fancy.
Then, if I still need to be entertained, I can always cruise through Viddler, Vimeo and even YouTube. The way I see it, I don’t need cable.
Has anyone else thought about canceling your cable TV? Or have you actually canceled it? Let us know.
5 Responses to “The Sunday Post 55”
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October 12th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Do it.
I’ve gone without paid television service for over two years now, and I’m no worse for wear. Unless they offer an a la carte service for the 3 non-national channels that I actually would want to pay for, there’s very little reason to pay that much for a service that isn’t used.
October 14th, 2008 at 9:05 am
We come close to doing it all the time…but then I think of all the college/pro football I watch (50% on espn/2), political coverage (cnn), and my addiction to the food network it’s just not going to happen. Sure, I could find these shows online, rip them to the apple tv but it’s tedious enough to do that for about 4 shows I do now- I couldn’t imagine doing it for everything I wanted to watch.
as for buying an apple tv- go for it! also, if you don’t want to spend the extra $ for the largest hdd get the small one- the streaming on the apple tv works great and it mashes your library together in a seamless way (ex: my apple tv has a 40gb drive yet when i leave itunes on on the main computer the apple tv finds all the other pictures, videos, songs, etc that it doesn’t have locally and just streams).
October 14th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Besides that, I noticed that among the ports on the back is a USB port. Couldn’t one hook up an external drive to that if more space was needed?
October 14th, 2008 at 10:00 am
well, yes it can be done but you’ve got to hack it first. after hearing how leo bricked his appletv at first i haven’t been man enough to try it. here’s one way to do it:
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gigantastic-potential/apple-tv-hack-allows-external-usb-storage-283532.php
October 23rd, 2008 at 9:04 am
[...] This will work pretty well for me when I drop TV from my Fios service. [...]