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Cutting the Cord (Ditching TV, not having a baby)

Go with Google Voice hooked up to something like an osi 110 and there's a home phone line.

We cut cable a while ago ourselves. HD antennas work fine for football. You won't get Thursday or Monday night football but so far, I can live with that. You also don't get the wide array of college football games you had previously but that's okay.

For regular TV, we have a few Roku boxes streaming shows from a media PC that is running PlayOn.
 
I'm a few months in to this. It's fine and with OTA HD and a WatchESPN login I can get all the sports I need. Hulu plus has been a good replacement for a DVR. Here are the drawbacks I have found so far. WatchESPN feeds are not the best, especially the ESPN3 content. However the OTA HD picture is better than cable. You need a plan for each TV in your house. We have an xbox on the main TV and another is a smart TV with apps and the 3rd is using a chromecast. Get use to repetitive commercials that all you can do is mute. I was streaming Breaking Bad from AMCTV.com this week and the picture froze up a couple of times and I had to restart. You can forward to where you left off but you will watch all the commercials that appeared up to that point again and many of them are the same. I never want to see an ad for GTA5 again. I guess I miss watching that goofy triple D guy on food network but that's about it. Once get use to how to find what you want to watch it's really no big deal.
 
I'm a few months in to this. It's fine and with OTA HD and a WatchESPN login I can get all the sports I need. Hulu plus has been a good replacement for a DVR. Here are the drawbacks I have found so far. WatchESPN feeds are not the best, especially the ESPN3 content. However the OTA HD picture is better than cable. You need a plan for each TV in your house. We have an xbox on the main TV and another is a smart TV with apps and the 3rd is using a chromecast. Get use to repetitive commercials that all you can do is mute. I was streaming Breaking Bad from AMCTV.com this week and the picture froze up a couple of times and I had to restart. You can forward to where you left off but you will watch all the commercials that appeared up to that point again and many of them are the same. I never want to see an ad for GTA5 again. I guess I miss watching that goofy triple D guy on food network but that's about it. Once get use to how to find what you want to watch it's really no big deal.

Actually, being forced to watch commercials is a big pain point for me. It seems like everyone is going that way whether you have a provider agreement or not. We have DirecTV and had to watch an episode of The Good Wife on demand for some reason. You could start the show, and you could pause the show, but you couldn't fast forward. Couldn't even fast forward through the show to get past the part we'd already seen. Sucks.

I would seriously rather just pay for the episode and watch it. Make it easy and reasonably priced and I'll just pay for the content.
 
Have we gotten any further along at finding a way to get ESPN while cutting the cord?
 
Borrow a friend's/family's WatchESPN login and get yourself a Roku and/or AppleTV. It's that simple. Throw him/her a few bucks a month if you feel guilty about it.
 
Or just give them your netflix password.
 
Have we gotten any further along at finding a way to get ESPN while cutting the cord?

Borrow a login from a friend or go to a bar and spend the money you're saving by not having cable. I do both, but prefer the latter whenever possible, especially since there are still a lot of blackouts on the WatchESPN app.
 
apparently Comcast is playing major defense to people looking to cut cable after their horrible PR... now's the time to call and get rates reduced!
 
I've been off cable for a while now. The best streaming device I have found is the Roku but the Chromecast is getting better and better. I plan to reconnect for the right deal when football season starts. I have a WatchESPN login but some games are still blocked out. Usually the ones carried on Foxsports. It's also not easy to flip back and forth between games when you are streaming. I'll sign up with either TWC or Uverse and cancel after March Madness. I have absolutely no use for cable during the summer.
 
I love articles that consider sticking a slingbox in a friend's house and taking their cable as "getting rid of cable." Not to mention you're crushing their outgoing bandwidth unless they have FiOS upload speeds.

It just depends what it's worth to you. I have an OTA dual tuner in a PC that can record and distribute HD to my TV's - I basically never use it. Clunky interfaces, failed recordings, glitchy software - it wears on you quick. And if you bought a nice shiny flat screen TV and watching streamed sports works for you - that's great. I think they look pretty awful. It's one thing to get a feed of a Wake game that's not on anywhere else, but there are no streaming services - especially not the borderline legal ones - that come anywhere close to an actual HD feed.

I think you just have to ask yourself if it's worth the savings to deal with trying to record OTA stuff and having generally poor quality, not-so-dependable options for non-network sports. It may very well be.

One thing you could do is just get basic cable. It's not advertised much but Comcast can give you like 8 channels for $15/month, and if you have internet they knock like $10/month off the bill for having 2 services from them so it's almost free. It at least includes ESPN (not espn2 though) and sadly they caught on to watching espn2 content on watchESPN while only being a basic subscriber. But ESPN works and gives you online access. Not sure what TWC's deal is but I assume they would align eventually.

It's still an uphill battle to be a sports fan who wants to watch HD sports and ditch a true tv provider.
 
We ditched cable. Still have Internet and pay for Hulu plus. Best decision ever.
 
Go with Google Voice hooked up to something like an osi 110 and there's a home phone line.

We cut cable a while ago ourselves. HD antennas work fine for football. You won't get Thursday or Monday night football but so far, I can live with that. You also don't get the wide array of college football games you had previously but that's okay.

For regular TV, we have a few Roku boxes streaming shows from a media PC that is running PlayOn.

We never got the PlayOn stuff to work right but we have a Plex server running most of our movie / tv show collection now.
 
Actually, have a baby. You won't have time for TV. Problem solved.
 
A "friend" suggested getting a jailbroken Amazon Fire tv box - not the firestick. Sounded pretty cool but also pretty shady... Not sure I understand how this process works. What the advantages and disadvantages??
 
Not really a friend, just a guy that knows us and will talk (a lot - about a lot) when he sees us out. this was several weeks ago, and I wasn't really listening to him because I didn't know wtf he was talking about hence my question when I started reading this thread. He just said that he ditched cable and that this was loaded w/all types of programming Netflix, amazon, hulu, etc. He also mentioned that he got all the networks and espn.
 
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