So, we're considering dropping DishNetwork and just purchasing TV shows on a per-show basis in the future. We already have two Apple TVs and have been quite happy with them (even if they have some annoyances and still feel like "toy" products from Apple's perspective).

Basically, at this point I feel like we can download or buy and rip all the TV shows we watch for cheaper than we are paying monthly for our DVR + satellite, and then we'll own them permanently. There may be better deals out there than what we are paying for satellite (I think $75 a month), and I realize there are probably cheaper options if I hook a computer up to our TV, but the convenience of the Apple TV added to the fact my wife gets a LOT of reply value out of the stuff we own (I've lost count of the number of times she's re-watched Buffy, Angel, Charmed, Firefly, SatC, and Friends) makes this option pretty compelling. I'm not a big fan of re-watching TV shows/movies, but she is, and she watches a lot due to her back disability and having to be down a lot.

I really do think in the end this would be cheaper. We'll probably drop $100-$150 in the fall to buy some season passes, but other than that I think our monthly costs will be much lower (I expect to get a lot of mileage out of all the DVDs we already own, thanks to my wife's viewing habits).

Anyway, has anyone else considered doing something similar yet? This feels a lot like the time when I got and empeg and boxed up my CDs (I'm now boxing up DVDs as we rip them), but the empeg was a lot better product than the Apple TV. Also, have I sold my soul to satan (er, Steve Jobbs), but owning multiple Apple TVs?

I have thought about it but I tend to just have the TV on playing something I like and only about half watch it. I suppose I could do that with hulu or netflix but it wouldn't be as easy. Also I like the documentary type shows on discovery health, A&E, etc and those are not really on the on-demand services so much.

I have been thinking about switching from cable to Dish because Dish sounds cheaper. Can you say what you are paying for fees on top of the package price for Dish ? Cable has tons of little fees and things. Dish should be cheaper if there isn't a ton of that kind of stuff.

My stance on this idea has always been the same, no matter what technology has come along: I freaking LOVE the idea, but I personally watch far too much TV to make it feasible for myself.

So essentially, it all comes down to how much TV you watch, and how much it's worth to you to have more discovery (not the channel). For example, when someone says "oh, you should check out ____." With a DVR you can just set that up for no additional fee. But with pay-per-watch, you might be extra hesitant to watch something new if you know that it'll cost you a few bucks.

If it works for your specific use case, I say go for it. For me, I want the DVR for all the shows I watch, and for live events.

*edit*
Plus, we only pay around $50 for the basic Verizon FIOS package, which includes a very decent number of channels (90% of which we'll never watch, of course).

The discovery thing is definitely an issue. Not for me, but for my wife. I pretty much go by word of mouth for discovering new shows, and I don't mind spending two bucks on an episode if it's been recommended by someone I trust. My wife, OTOH, is always discovering new shows through the DVR- and I don't know how she's found them, tbh.

At any rate, atm iTunes is offering a LOT of pilot episodes for free downloads- if they keep doing stuff like that it answers the "discovery" question for us pretty well. Just this weekend I downloaded a ton of episodes of shows I hadn't seen just to try them out.

Also, we watch close to NO live events- so that helps.

There's another option, one I never would have considered a year ago: Do without.

I have cable TV at my house, and the only reason it is there is for the 6 Mb/sec internet connection, the fastest that is available in this part of Mexico. Of the 77 channels I can receive, there is not one that interests me since they dropped the English language Discovery Channel. I watch an occasional DVD (rental cost: 10 pesos, about 80 cents) but my TV set has not actually been turned on in weeks.

You cannot imagine how incredibly liberating it is to not be tied to the idiot box, to not worry about missing an episode of [fill in favorite program name here], to not get upset because the cretins responsible for production made a complete hash of the programming continuity in "Heroes". [I know about that because I read it here on the bbs! ]

A year ago I was watching 40 hours of television a week and I'd spend another hour or so tweaking my TiVo so I'd be sure not to miss anything. God, what a waste. And you know what? I don't miss it. Not the slightest bit. When I read the threads on this bbs about the current TV shows, and the debates about what the plot line(s) in "Lost" really mean, I have an almost irresistible temptation to chime in and say "Look, guys, it isn't real!". It's hard to express how much more full my life is without TV.

It's ironic that I'm retired and supposedly have all this free time, and now is when I have left television out of my life. It's better without it.

tanstaafl.

I lived four years of college with zero television. In grad school, I found myself making regular visits to a dorm with a TV set and realized, you know, I can afford my own TV set, so I bought one. Back then, I carefully juggled VHS tapes to make sure I could get my weekly fix of the handful of shows I cared about.

Now, with the TiVo, it's all so much easier. I don't think I watch any more TV than before, but when I do watch, it's so much more satisfying to zap the commercials and otherwise control the experience.

As to specific hardware, my AppleTV is flaking out. At this stage, it will run maybe an hour with an ice pack on the top, much less otherwise. (Apple had the idea of thermally connecting the Intel chip to the case, and avoiding any fans. Sadly, they also never provisioned sufficient surface area to radiate all the heat it generates.) There's some temptation to replace the AppleTV with a new Mac mini, but then I think you don't get the full spectrum of content you can get on the AppleTV. I'm not clear on exactly how this has evolved.

Of course, there are other vendors, such as Amazon, offering content through an Internet-connected TiVo. (And, via pyTivo and other such services, TiVo can painlessly play content you download on your computer via BitTorrent in whatever format.) I'll be particularly intrigued this fall when the Boxee Box finally ships, as Boxee is frantically working out content distribution deals. Maybe they'll accomplish what Apple has not. Likewise, there's the forthcoming Google box.

Suffice it to say that there will be a variety of technologies competing for your ala carte TV watching dollars in time for this year's Christmas season. It's presently unclear who the real winner will be, if any.

I agree. If cable/sat was $10 a month, I'd buy it, but as it's what I consider way overpriced, I watch over the air. It seems there's never a shortage of stuff to watch.

And, no offense, that would have been a little annoying.

Would you make the same comment if we were discussing a novel?

Sorry, that just got under my skin a little. I'm happy that you're happy without TV, but I thoroughly enjoy it and consider it a hobby in which I get very invested. Also, I have two tuners that prevent me from having to spend those hours you mentioned plotting out the week's recordings, so there's no pain or hassle for me.

It can definitely do that, though I question how painless it is. It was painful enough for me to be on my second $100+ media streaming box, and ready to drop $200 on the Boxee Box.

But, if it's all you have, you are correct that pyTivo will most certainly do the job if you have a computer fast enough to do the transcoding.

As much as I would love this option, it isn't one. There was a time about 8 or so years ago where we didn't have cable after a move and didn't ever watch DVDs- we hardly turned on the TV at all. It was a good time in our marriage. Sadly, our situation has changed.

With my wife's back troubles, TV is really the only option for her when waiting for medication to take effect. The pain makes focusing on reading difficult, so there really isn't much to do in bed except watch TV. This is a situation she finds herself in 3 times a day (on most days) for about an hour each time, and more on days where the pain keeps her in bed longer. Unfortunately, this isn't something that will ever improve save medical advances that will allow her to someday replace the parts of her back that are causing this pain.

In fact, this was the entire justification for buying the first Apple TV- it allows her to watch any movie we own without having to get up out of bed and switch discs. I'm certain you can see the benefits there.

The reason we don't watch any live events is that I more or less could do without TV- I don't watch sports, and TV is mostly about watching stuff with my wife because that's the past time she can enjoy the most. For a while we tried playing WoW together, but even computer games become difficult to focus on when her pain level is high.

I think I pay about $80-$90 per month for pretty much everything they offer. I haven't had cable in forever, but with DirecTV the same package cost about $140 per month. If I remember, I'll get a price breakdown when I get home.

I'm so sorry to hear about that, Jeff. That sounds just awful. I really hope something can be done about that one day...

I'm relatively new to the game, so I don't know what it used to be like. I just installed the PyTivoX image on my Mac and it just worked, right out of the box. Okay, the "transfer" option insisted on downcoding everything from HD to SD, but the streaming option seems to work fine. Maybe it helps that I've got a top-end Mac Pro...

You could supplement that (in a BIG way), by hooking up a modest antenna to your digital TV, and exploring the 20-30 local HD channels in your market. For FREE.

Cheers

It does, and it also helps that you have a Mac at all, so you didn't have to install Python.

I also haven't played with pyTivoX. The pain I think of with pyTivo is really only up to and including installation. I was working with just plain pyTivo, and it was always incredibly confusing figuring out which files I had to download, as there were different forks of the project, and the people who worked on it, frankly, were a-holes who expected everyone who used it to be a programmer. Man, those guys pissed me off.

Once I had it installed, it took a little setting up and some time to get all the settings correct, but after that it almost always worked just fine. I just needed to have a computer fast enough to do the transcoding. Once I upgraded my PC I was able to do HD video transfers (well, compressed HD MKV's) in nearly real time.

Darn, I forgot to suggest that! That's a good enough excuse to get a Tivo HD, though that would be a little added monthly cost. Still, for as little as $12-13 a month you'd get a lot of OTA programming. It might be worth it if you figure out how many shows you'd be watching through iTunes are major network shows. It would lessen the replay aspect, though with Tivo to Go, you can get those recordings off the Tivo pretty easily.

Plus, OTA HD quality would beat out iTunes...

Shouldn't the quality be about the same (iTunes HD that is?)

I think our network shows would be House, CSI, and Chuck, with possibly the addition of new shows if anything else good shows up. My guess is OTA + tivo would be cheaper, and of the three only Chuck is something I'd want to own for replay value.

Good thought and something I'll definitely be looking at.

Another hindrance I just discovered that apparently only seasons 1-6 of "King of the Hill" are available for purchase- this might be a deal killer as it's one of my wife's top shows and she is always DVR recording syndicated episodes for playback later.

Just as a comparison... The OTA broadcast of Lord of the Rings is apparently superior to the BluRay release.

The stuff on iTunes is tiny compared to broadcast and BluRay. It's also not available in 1080, while some broadcast stuff is.

OTA gets me most of what we watch. I really can't see paying TiVo $12 a month for a little box with practically no HD space though. OTA broadcasts are quite huge and I have 1.5TB of recording space that I still have to prune (or leave it set up for auto-deleting episodes).

Well, like I said, you can always take the recordings off of the Tivo and free up space that way. You could even leave them, un-transcoded, on your Tivo Desktop computer and they'd be available any time you wanted.

As for built-in storage, I agree that there's far too little space on the basic models. However, at least three times now I've seen the Tivo HD XL on Woot for about $180, and that has 150 hours of HD recording. Plus you could add that branded Western Digital drive and get a ton more.

20-30?!?

I can get, maybe, four (notably, neither CBS or FOX), and then only with the largest directional antenna available. At least according to AntennaWeb. Real-world experience with a smaller interior antenna would seem to confirm that. (Yes, there are subchannels, but very little additional programming on them. It's mostly SD copies of the main subchannel and then news/weather.)

And I'm hardly in the boonies. Raleigh is like the 50th largest MSA in the country (out of something like 1000 total). And I'm inside the city limits.

OTA antennae work remarkably well in the city here in Houston, but then I'm only ~11 miles away from most of the transmission towers and they're all in the same compass direction. This worked exceptionally well for me back when I had the DirecTV HD TiVo (HD10-250) that used satellite for national channels and OTA for locals. Now I'm just using my local Comcast and paying scandalous monthly fees for the standard digital service. If and when I can get a decent DVR from an alternate content provider (and by "decent", I require content extraction, so I can move my TV shows onto my phone prior to going on business travel), I'll happily switch away from Comcast.

As to the various current TiVo models, there are several tricks:

- Pony up for the "lifetime" service, rather than paying the monthly fees. Assuming you keep your box over two years or so, it pays off, and it also increases the resale value. If they won't sell you lifetime service directly, find somebody who already has a TiVo, and they may be able to buy it for a new box when then goes in your name. (I've never understood TiVo's policies on this.)

- Consider getting the newer TiVo Premiere or Premiere XL. You get a physically smaller box that draws less power and has 100Mbit Ethernet (versus 10Mbit on the TiVo HD). In practice, I'm seeing 30-40 Mbit/sec when doing content extraction. I think they're selling the Premiere for much less than the XL, since most upgraders (like me) want the extra capacity without needing an external HD.

There's way more than 100 OTA channels (including subs) in the Los Angeles area... Only Fox is duplicating it's transmissions, and only three channels worth.

Tivo is hilarious with this stuff. Back in around 2005 I was moving and couldn't have Tivo service at my new place. I was going to call Tivo and cancel my service so that I could give my friend my old Tivo and he could sign up for it himself.

Well, I called them up and was forwarded to a retention guy. He came back with the offer of $6 a month for Tivo service. At this point I'd finally figured out how to log into my Tivo account and noticed I could simply change every bit of information, from my billing address and credit card info to my login name (email address), and decided to say "oh, okay, you got me. I'll take the $6/month service." So I did, and my friend ended up with a super cheap Tivo service.

OTA should beat the quality of just about any source other than perhaps some bluray discs. See.. they've got 19mbits/sec to play with on an OTA physical channel, far more than cable or satellite, and definitely way better than standard DVD or most kinds of legal downloads.

Rather than pay a monthly Tivo fee for free OTA, just dedicate a PC with one or more ATSC tuners to the task, and install SageTV or a free equivalent (BeyondTV, MythTV, GBPVR, etc..). A modern (though low-end, eg. Nvidia GT210) PCIe video card is required for this method, though.

Go to tvfool.com, enter your zip code (or better yet, street address), and see what it says. It will give a pretty reasonable indication of how much OTA you can expect to get from your (almost) exact location.

Cheers

19mbit of MPEG 2 bitrate != 19mbit MPEG 4 Part 10 (h.264) bitrate.

OTA HD broadcasts use MPEG 2 compression. Most BluRay discs and most streaming/download services like iTunes use H.264. OTA is also capped at 1080i, BluRay and other services go to the full 1080p.

So direct comparisons aren't really easy here. Add in complications with source differences, and it becomes a really mixed bag. At the end of the day, it's possible for an iTunes download to beat out the quality of a BluRay or OTA broadcast just as easily as an OTA broadcast could put iTunes or BluRay to shame.

Sure. Optimistically, h.264 might do as well with merely half the bitrate. But how many download services are there that provide 8-9mbits/sec streaming?

Cheers

Amendment: PyTiVoX / StreamBaby completely failed to deal with 1080i ".ts" files (containing h.264 within) that I recently downloaded. Am now fetching 720p MKV files to see whether they work any better. Grrr.

I have some HD files I've purchased from iTunes. Is there a way I can tell the quality? I will fully admit I am ignorant in this area. We don't even own a BR player, but we have some HD movies purchased through iTunes and they've always looked good to me on our 32".

I don't know about "quality" but it's straightforward to measure the bitrate. Just look at the file size divided by the length of the show. From what I've seen, Apple iTunes HD downloads tend to clock in near 5 Mbits/sec, and look reasonably good. Apple's SD downloads, for contrast, are much worse than terrestrial SD broadcasts.

Ditto for MythTV, xine, and mplayer here. Or at least with the versions I have of those programs. No problemos with the MKV files, though.

Cheers