Intro
My cable bill is $125 a month. Ridiculous. That includes road runner and hd cable. It also includes that lovely $8/month fee for the dvr. Over the lifetime of that dvr I’m pretty sure I have paid for it about 5 times. My plan is to set myself up with an alternative to cable, perfect it, and get as many other people as I can to do the same thing. My first goal is to keep Time Warner Cable from making $1250 a year from me. After that, I will start preaching and hopefully converting other people as well.
My plan:
- Get an over-the-air digital antenna, to receive local channels (including all the major networks, and HDTV) for free.
- Build my own DVR, possibly with Windows Media Center.
- Watch “cable channels” such as Comedy Central and Food Network over the Internet.
- Cancel my cable, except the road runner part so that I can still do #3.
- Research other options for Internet.
Part 1
Most people (including me until not long ago) don’t realize that tv stations all over the place are broadcasting over-the-air (OTA) HD signals, and that the quality of those signals can be better than what you can get over cable or satellite (because these OTA signals don’t use all the lossy compression that cable and satellite signals do). Buying a UHF digital antenna will allow you to pickup these signals, for free.
So, I bought a UHF digital antenna. Specifically I got the Philips PHDTV1 Silver Sensor indoor antenna from Amazon.com, I connected it to my tv and it works great! Now of course I’m not receiving MTV and Comedy Central with this – instead I just get whatever signals are broadcast in my geographic location. In my case those are FOX/HD, CBS/HD, NBC/HD, ABC/HD, PBS/HD, CW/HD, WRDC/HD, and some spanish channels. Sweet!