Saturday, September 24, 2011

TV - Never will be the same!!

So in an effort to create a budget and really hone in on some ways to save money; we decided to ditch the concept of paying for TV subscriptions. There has been this whole idea a few years back on ipTV; what a novel concept right? Your already paying for internet service in most homes today and some of us are even tapping into VOIP technology; so why not use it to watch TV as well. Well we all know if corporate America can not make any money on this then it was not going to go well. Guess what that is exactly what happened and providers such as COX, COMCAST, AT&T, and many others started to raise a stink about this. The problem was and is that there is no way to bill for this type of service reliably just yet.

Well we took advantage of what I predict will be the next wave of the future for most homes and we have not paid a service provider to watch TV for the past six months now. We are doing this with a mixture of an over the air ClearStream 2 long range antenna and ipTV through a service called "PLAYON".

So you might ask well what are the pros and cons right? Well here are some of them for our family and I will start out with the CONS first. So if there is a specific live show that is coming on a channel that your not getting over the air; then you won't be able to watch it. But the next day it will be posted up either on HULU or whatever other channel it might of been as long as you have access to it through PLAYON. Also the whole rewind and fast forward concept is a bit slow and sometimes does not work at all that well only on PLAYON. Now for the PROS; I would start out by saying well the obvious there is no monthly fee; but a onetime fee of $100 for the ClearStream 2 antenna and $79 for PLAYON. Also you will not believe the amount of HD channels you get over the air for FREE and how clear they come in; it is just so awesome. With PLAYON if you miss a show the night before and you didn't record it; then you can watch it the next day once it is posted to that particular channel.

Now this took Carrie a little getting use to and I got the IT calls while at work about a few issues at first like some channels on PLAYON not working. After a few days after work of working out the kinks such as filtering through the channels that work and don't work; we were good to go. I can't say that we would have adopted to this right off the bat if I did not work in IT; but I do and I am all electronic.... SERIOUSLY.... :). The great thing about this is that it works and it works very well and we are happy to save now $100 a month.

Last thing I will say about this and I only want to brag a little because this is just so cool. Well when using an over the air antenna; traditionally you would connect it directly to your TV set(s) right? Not me I am using a product from Microsoft called Windows Media Center (MWMC) to deliver the over the air HD signal to the TV's through an XBOX 360. Now you would ask why do this; well you can now have full DVR functionality and there are some other cool things you can do to share music, photos, and videos. I am also using my XBOX 360 to deliver the PLAYON service to the TV's in the house as well and it works fantastic. Now typically to get this done you would have a PC in the home that delivers MWMC and PLAYON to your 360. Well I went a step further and I am running a virtual machine on my MAC Mini of Microsoft Windows 7 and it is the only PC in the house. This is cool because we can have the awesome experience of using a MAC and the Microsoft Windows OS with being so energy efficient and really you can't tell that the MAC Mini is even on; just simply amazing. Well that is all for now but like I said I can talk electronics and technology all day. ENJOY!!!