Unthinkability

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.