Unthinkability

Sharing the joy of “media binge-fests” means sharing the knowledge of media distribution networks.  It’s like having a ‘media refrigerator’ in every room, allowing you to snack on new “30 Rock” episodes and old 80’s movies on Netflix Streaming, anytime and in any room.  Kids can watch recorded Dora The Explorer downstairs while mom hides in the bedroom watching episode after episode of NCIS, CSI, and SVU.

Our house is wired with a 10-drop house-wide CAT5 network and 802.11b wireless.  With the home-run cable network in my house and the RF modulator that I installed, I can watch our Windows Media Center on any regular TV in the house by tuning to channel 3.  I also have an XBOX 360 as a media extender connected to the ‘big screen’ in the living room.  I can also access the recorded content from any of the laptops and PCs in the house. 

So we can watch recorded TV, Netflix, DVDs on any TV in the house.  You can do it, too.  I created a diagram of the one that I built for my home back in 2005.  It would be helpful if you had an RF meter to work out the cable TV signal strength levels, but you might be able to “eyeball” it and get lucky.  (If you run into cable signal problems, you’ll need a cable TV RF signal level meter and some knowledge to work it out.  Those RF meters cost over $1,000 and are not commonly-found at rental places, but maybe you can buy your local cable guy a few beers and have him help you out.)

We’re considering getting rid of our cable and reverting back to off-air HD broadcasts for our new content, and continuing our Netflix and Hulu/Fancast for the older stuff.  Considering that would save us $700 a year, it seems like a no brainer.  Our home media network makes it an even more obvious move.

Enjoy!

Why on earth do we pay the cableco $700/year to watch repeats when we have this media system in our house? I am on a mission to quit cable TV. The rest of the family is not too sure.

My wife likes several shows on several cable networks; Hoarders on A&E, Challenge on The Food Network, and the endless reruns of CSI:Whatever on whichever channels.  I also like the Futurama reruns on Comdey Central, and the Battlestar Galactica franschise on SyFy.  The startling revelation is: we can buy 20 seasons’ worth of DVDs for the price we pay for cable in a year ($700).

Sure these are tough economic times for everyone, but that is not my primary motivation.  My main goal is to get “Zach & Cody On Deck,” “iCarly,” “Hannah Montana,” and “Wizards of Waverly Place” out of my house.  The money savings is just a perk.

We have hundreds of books, broadband internet (via cable), an XBOX 360, Rock Band and Guitar Hero, two Ninetndo DS Lites, three laptops, a couple of Zunes, board games, Netflix, RedBox, and a Windows Media Center feeding this house.  Yet, I often find my kids staring agape at some rerun of some insipid Disney Channel show.  I am calling it.  The End!

I just built this antenna and put it up on our garage roof (mostly hidden from view).  It is a homemade UHF antenna for receiving over-the-air TV broadcasts. The Hoverman design is popular with the do-it-yourself crowd, and this simplified version is from www.makezine.com.  You can go full-blown if you want to, but the simple version is working for us at the moment.

I disconnected the cable from the main house feed 20 minutes ago.  I connected the Hoverman antenna to an RF amplifier, and connected the amp to the main house feed.  Viola!  (Note to self: there are two TVs in the house that are still analog, so they will be Media Center-only TVs, or I’ll need to get off-air converter boxes.)

If you think that I am brave, you need to know that I am cheating.  My wife is not all-the-way on board with the plan, but she agreed to try it with the kids for a while.  The Media Center is still connected to the cable company, and it will still record shows from the cableco;  I have not cancelled our cable service yet.  She’ll still be able to watch her shows if she sets the Media Center to record them.

So, the saga continues.  The next step is to live without cable on the televisions for a week or two and see how it goes.  I need to find answers to my wife’s concerns (Hoarders, Challenge, etc), and need to find a converter box for her laundry room TV.  After that, I hope to completely cut the cord on the CableTV and cancel our cable (though we’ll continue to use and pay for business broadband internet service).

My stance: Our house cannot function without paper towels.  Everything else is negotiable.

Our TVs are disconnected from cable TV (though our Media Center is still recording shows from cable).  The kids have already adjusted to the change.

The kids are playing hide-and-seek, Guitar Hero, putting together puzzles, watching Harry Potter movies, playing their DS’s, reading books. 

We are sitting on the couch with the kids on Sunday watching U.S. Figure Skating on our local NBC broadcast affiliate in high-definition.  Pretty.  Dad is watching his Futurama on DVD while working at the computer, Mom is watching her Good Morning America in amazing hi-def clarity while getting ready for work.  She even commented on how clear the picture was.  Life is good.

Problem:  “Damages” is on tonight on FX (Cable).  We had not watched the previous seasons on cable, but we caught up on DVD.  Insanely-captivating show.  How will I convince my wife that it is OK to wait for it to come out on DVD?  I’ll let you know how it goes.

I disconnected the Media Center from the local cable provider, connected it to the over-the-air (OTA) antenna, and ran the setup process on the Media Center to find the digital channels.  I had a brief panic before I realized that I needed to connect the OTA cables to different connectors on the Hauppauge tuner cards.  That was followed by excitement when I saw the cards auto-find all of the local OTA channels.  The Media Center (the truly amazing bit of programming that it is), found our scheduled network shows in the new channel lineup and automatically updated the recording schedules to use the new channels.

The Coat Hanger Hoverman works better than I had ever expected, though I shouldn’t be surprised; many people are having good luck with it.  We’ll have to see how it will hold up in the wind, weather, etc.  I have a plastic bag over it at the moment to help shield it from the elements, and the bag does not seem to be diminishing the signal significantly;  the seven RF ‘drops’ in the house are all being serviced from that single antenna (and an RF amplifier) with brilliant digital signal.

As of noon on Saturday Jan 30th, 2010, this house is no longer using cable television.

My wife came on board fully a few days ago, and she gave me the green light to disconnect the cable service.  I disconnected the physical cable yesterday, but I am waiting a couple of days before I call the cable company to terminate service; I want to ensure that our media systems will work well with the RF antenna. 

One day after completely disconnecting our house from the RF cable service (but keeping the internet service via the cable modem), everything is working and we are adjusting nicely. 

The kids had been getting used to the idea for the past week because I had disconnected the TVs from cable.  They filled their time with other things like DVDs and games, though my oldest daughter has asked a few times “when will we get to watch real TV again,” to which I had responded with a “we’ll have to see.”

My wife and I had a talk with the kids about it last night at dinner time, and we explained that we have lots of things to do in our house besides watching TV.  I told them that we will no longer pay the many, many times their allowance for us to watch the same shows over and over.

Reactions:

Our oldest daughter’s eyes welled up when she heard that she would not be able to watch her Disney shows 24 hours a day. 

I told her that Hannah Montana and Zach & Cody would record once a week on Saturday morning (courtesy of ABC), and that would be enough.  She recovered quickly, though I’m sure that this will be “one of those times” that she remembers forever.  Bummer.

Our other two daughters are perfectly cool with it; just more time to play Lego Indiana Jones, Marble Blast, and Guitar Hero… and My Little Pony.

Dictating Change

I suppose that this is an illustration that effective Parenthood requires a benevolent dictatorship.  (Yes, we are also stewards of our children, but stewardship does not sufficiently address the management of dissent.)  In the end, this is such a small change resulting in such great benefit to the children and the household that it would be irresponsible to not follow through.  I regret not doing it sooner, and that is my constant burden.

Spare TV, anyone?

In the process of converting from analog to digital, I found some incredible deals for LCD TVs on eBay, and we are left with two spare TV’s that require converter boxes. 

Our babysitter is a college student, and we were able to ‘gift’ her one of our old analog-only TVs for $5.  The $5 was really just a formality because she would not accept it for “free.”  We need to find a good home for one more.

I called the cable company yesterday to discontinue service.  The call center representative was very polite and did not try to change my mind.  These cancellation calls can be a pain, like when I originally dropped Vonage.  In contrast, the cable rep was quick and efficient while being friendly.  (I mean, really, could a stranger on the phone actually talk you out of disconnecting your service?)

They prorated our monthly bill, so we only owe about half of the usual amount even though the lineman won’t be out to disconnect the line for another couple weeks.  Our RF system is disconnected from the cable service inside the house, so it doesn’t really matter to us.

I double-checked with the call center rep to make sure that the work order included a note about not disrupting our internet service (on a separate account).  She even read the note back to me, but I am still a little worried that the lineman will do something to screw it up.  Perhaps I am too cynical, lack faith, and am blindly distrustful of strangers.  We’ll find out in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, the wife is enjoying the high-def shows like CSI and House and GMA, I am catching up with my old friends David Letterman and Conan O’Brien, and the kids are no longer missing the endless stream of pre-teen snot-nosed brat dialogue that had spewed from the Disney/Nickelodeon channels just 11 days ago. *Ahhhhh*

I feel like a convert, a reborn media consumer.  I feel like some kind of religious freak enthusiast who has just discovered the invisible truth that has been there all along.  I was blind, and now I can see.  I am driven to share my new-found knowledge.  I shall become insufferable!

No.  I won’t.

Marc Maron recently had a rant about this particular topic, wishing that everyone could just unplug for [a month?] and reset.  I don’t recall his exact quote, but it was along the lines of “How much of our angst and frenzy is self-inflicted, driven by the media that we are gladly jamming down our eye sockets and ear holes.  WTF!”

Two years ago, I would have thought that Marc was a knee-jerk praetorian.  Today, I am a believer.

Still not missing cable, and it has become the new normal.  So much so, in fact, that I had to force myself to write this update.  It’s so not a big deal.

The cable company sent us a full bill this month dated Feb 15, so I called them to ensure that they had our cutoff order in the system.  The call center rep confirmed our cutoff date as Feb. 2nd, and said that their ‘system’ has not yet ‘finalized’ the cutoff.  She tried to shorten the time and bring the ‘finalization date’ closer, but her computer would only extend the date, not shorten it.  She told us to not pay this new bill (since we had paid more than the prorated amount already), and she confirmed again that we would receive a refund check for the overage.

So, we continue to watch TV as a family in the evening.  The Olympics currently dominate NBC, with hours and hours of snow sports on the local affiliate.  The kids like watching ‘the pretty girls’ skating with those ‘handsome boys.’  The NBC network aired the Olympic Curling competitions on CNBC, so we did not get to see it.  We will survive somehow.

NBC has our attention after the Olympics, too, with “Parenthood” and “The Marriage Ref” coming up, along with my own personal addiction “30 Rock.”  Fox has “House", and ABC has “Better Off Ted” (if they have enough insight to renew it for another season).  My wife is finding her “Hoarders” fix online, and the kids are watching the heck out of PBS Kids and Harry Potter movies.

Our RedBox rentals continue to outpace Netflix (which has not seen fit to send us more than a couple of new releases since November).  The kids are watching quite a bit of Netflix Streaming, and I wonder when Netflix will start capping the bandwidth.

I’ll try to remember to check in every once in a while.  Feel free to share your “quitting cable” stories/links in the comments.

The Comcast Cable lineman disconnected everything at our house at 10:15 am this morning by putting a blocking terminator on our line at the utility pole, rather than reading the very clear and easy-to-understand note about being sure that our Business Internet service was not interrupted.  (The customer service representative even read the note back to me and confirmed that it would print on the work order!)  Apparently, I am far too wise and experienced a soul to indulge in wishful thinking anymore.   

The Comcast’s credit, I called the Business Support line and they got another lineman out within the hour.  Our downtime was a grand total of 70 minutes.  That’s pretty stellar response time, but it was still a significant and preventable disruption in the middle of the business day, given that 50 minutes of that time was me managing the outage on the phone, checking my side of the cabling to make sure a squirrel didn’t chew through anything, making failover plans for the business gear in the event that they didn’t send someone out soon, and then meeting the 2nd lineman.  So, if they would send me a video of them slapping the carelessness out of the first lineman that couldn’t seem to spare the time to read the notes on the f***ing work order, that would be great.

Flash-Crack-BOOOOOM!!! Lightning and thunder woke us up this weekend during the first major Spring storm, and [boy] was it striking close to our house.  My first thought was of the new over-the-air antenna sitting on top of my garage, not properly grounded.  Doh.  This first storm was a not-so-gentle wakeup call. 

Lightning is a mysterious phenomenon.  It can strike a person directly without killing, and it can strike the ground killing everyone nearby.  More frightening to us technophiles than personal injury, lightning can really ruin your day by causing your expensive electronics to release the magic blue smoke required to make the gadgets function.  Sometimes the devices go out with a whimper or barely audible *pop*, and sometimes the devices go out with a flash and a bang.

When we subscribed to cable television from the utility pole, the cable was grounded at the point which it connected to the house using a ‘ground block.’   When I disconnected the CableCo’s cable and installed our new off-air antenna in February, I was really still in the “let’s see if this will even work” phase of the project.   Also, lightning was not a major concern in February, so I did not think about grounding it.  I changed my tune when I saw/heard that lightning/thunder!

My first instinct was to go buy a new grounding rod and some wire at the local Home Depot, but I remembered that “ground loops” can cause problems with RF signals.  I spent 2 hours researching the topic on various sites and determined that I should NOT mess around with a second grounding rod.  Using two grounding rods connected to the same house at different points can create dangerous ‘ground differentials.’  It can also be very expensive to bond the two grounding rods together due to the raw material cost of heavy gauge (#4) copper conductors and the complexity of burying the conductor at the proper depth.  According to every expert on the subject, your house should have a single point of common ground, and everything should be tied to that single point. 

So, I ran the antenna feed to the original grounding block from the original cable connection, and I ran a new ground wire from the antenna mast to the ground point on the house provided by the power utility company.  Whew.  We’re safe again.  Or at least as safe as we can be when it comes to lightning.