My local news has a live stream. Hulu shows most programs a day or two after it airs. I don't have a safe source for HBO programs though Netflix will usually eventually get the discs. Others may have options for you. We've been without cable now for a few years now and, honestly, I really don't miss it at all.

ESPN will be airing a wild card playoff game next season

we have DirectTV and don't want to have to deal with AT&T. Our kids don't watch TV. They are on their kindles or PCs all the time.

I want to still watch lots of football and tennis. I wonder if there's a way I can buy them online and have it come up on my TV somehow. We have a big LG TV with a lot of features.

You can get HD local sports broadcasts without cable. Amazon Hulu and Netflix provide tons of content at reasonable prices.

Unfortunately for me, I'm addicted to HBO, gotta have Game of Thrones.

Is on amazon,

There isn't enough time in the day to watch whats on roku/netflix! LOL

Cut the cable people and free yourselves! We did it 3 years ago and saved what? Hundreds if not thousands of dollars!

99% of it is garbage/commercials anyway and the price is going to go up each and every year! Does your paycheck? Yeah didn't think so.

As for the NFL, I can watch the local team for free in glorious uncompressed HD which is way better picture quality than you will get with cable TV.

I don't have to see every single game, every season. Go outside somewhere and enjoy life with the people you love. It beats the sh** out of wasting your life in front of a damn TV.

And you kids! Get off my lawn! Whoops sorry!

I'm thinking of getting a device that will give me capabilities that are generally equivalent to a smart TV. I think high def DVD players include wifi pickups that bring things like Netflix in from the intertubes.

don't have options for HBO to go, in case he is "testing" he scenario.
there are a lot of bizarre little stations offering old movies (and TV shows) and B movies or niche programming. the PBS through Roku is great.
There's some good stuff on the net tv players. HBO to go, however, is awesome.

But Roku has HDMI only, so I can't figure out how to make that work without replacing my TV. If not for that I would have gone with a Roku long ago. I was the first kid on my block to have a big high def screen and home theater setup. The picture is still great but the lack of HDMI is a problem.

forth from my Roku to my Sony Blueray player, the other is for cable. The Roku's interface is a lot nicer than the blue ray player's internet. Sony is controlling content on it, so I'm a bit meh about having it. But it was the same price as many plain blue rays.

Even if you run everything through an audio/video receiver like I do, it has to be all HDMI or all component. I do have one s-video input working on my receiver but it's 480i standard definition. It works when routed to my component TV but it's not high definition.

If anybody reading this reply can help me find a HDMI to component (AKA RGB) converter, I would be grateful. In that case I would convert the TV and roll all the rest to HDMI, since everything else including the A/V receiver is HDMI capable.

It seems they might have ones that go in both directions, and one of the 60-70$ ones is what you need?

http://www.amazon.com/Sewell-Component-to-HDMI-Converter/dp/B007SOEQVK

It's been about a year. Technology moves fast so I'll take another look tomorrow and will report back here. What I need is an HDMI to component converter in that direction. HDMI has integral audio but it is separate from the three component video cables. That is not a complication in my case because an A/V receiver strips out the audio for delivery to the surround system speakers.

It might not be legal to sell a converter that outputs true high definition video (720p, 1080i, & 1080p). If memory serves, this is why HDMI was standardized - to discourage home recording of commercial high definition broadcasts and copying of Blu-ray movies.

and I just said fuck it, I'll use the Sony for my Netflix and HBO to Go (which is like a complete library of all their series, so it is awesome). Sony's player in controlling the content, and it's impossible. I could do something where it mirrors from my computer, but I would rather just plug the damn laptop into my TV, if I have to. Sony's wifi player is a bit annoying, Roku is very well organized and easier to use. And it seems like they have little interest in controlling what I watch like Sony does. If this Roku is broken, I will look into Amazon too, but I really like the Roku.
Good luck!

uses the RCA yellow, red, white cables along with HDMI

http://www.roku.com/products/roku-1

http://www.roku.com/products/roku-2

I have the older Roku HD (which is named something else now) it has both RCA and HDMI.

Roku discontinued their last component supporting product in 2011.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roku

Thanks for pitching in all the same.

So I guess I missed few new types.

Or something...

News is easy, you can find news online all over the place.

HBO? How vital is it to your life? You can probably save a shit-ton of money if you're willing to wait until whatever programs you like become available on Netflix or whatever. How important is the immediate gratification to you?

NFL? Go to a bar on game days. You'll be supporting a local business, and you might actually have more fun than watching games by yourself.

Disclaimer: I've gone without TV for years, and I don't miss it a bit.

I'm ready to cut the cable. Everything on cable is (a) been there, done that, or (b) not worth watching.
I don't need a land line, either. So, the bundle has become a boondoggle. Besides, nothing after the year 2004 is worth watching. It's all mindless shit.

I live in a place where cable (Time-Warner) has a monopoly on everything telecom. Even just going to internet will still cost me twice as much as 'newbies', since only the cool deals apply to new folks.

It's a pyramid scheme. Valued customers are charged twice as much as the new folks (provided they sign a contract - aka - indentured servitude), in order to offset the deal the newbies get.

Screw it. Corporations need us. We don't need corporations.

Cut the cable!

(Edit - spelling)

Call them, tell them you're unhappy and want to leave them, but first you'll give them a chance to see what they can do for you. Our every channel 2 room dvr and all the movie channels and the basic internet is $110 per month. for the next year and then I call again.

for me and there is a bit of withdrawal. But I am looking at other avenues like antennas and such more actively than if I had just perpetually put off making the break.

srsly

and $8/per month for Netflix.

No HBO tho, but as I look at Roku's new channels now and then there seems to be a lot of sports channels but I don't like sports and pass the over so have no idea whether they are live events or what.

That is far too much a month to give to some rich CEO. Dump it!

Which is still far too high if you ask me. But our landline phone is only $10 a month where it was almost 50 a while back before we changed it.

This goes right to the core of the net neutrality issue.

I put in a Magic Jack Plus for phone service and it works fine. I still have my legacy landline but I'm reluctant to give it up because service is so shitty. At least this way I have the cable modem/Magic Jack goes out, and vice versa with the landline. I have a cell phone but it's not good for a backup at home because I get no reception out here in rural West Virginia.

I've been without a TV or cable or satellite for six years now. It started as a money-saving thing and I considered it an experiment. Now, I can't imagine ever bothering with the real thing.

I wake up every morning to Amy Goodman (Democracy Now) on the radio. I listen to various news and information shows in the morning. In the evenings I watch Rachel Maddow at the MSNBC site. I could actually watch most of their shows, but hers is the only one I generally bother with.

Whenever something genuinely newsworthy happens I find that going to the local TV stations is effective, because they will usually go to streaming broadcast at such times.

Is there actually anything on HBO that you can't get on Netflix? I honestly have no idea, because we last had HBO about twenty years ago and gave it up as not worth it.

Sports I can't help you out with, as I am simply indifferent to all sports. However, I suppose you could hang out at sports bars during the season.

I have Netflix, both streaming and DVDs, and Hulu, although I gave up Hulu Prime a month or so ago, deciding it wasn't worth the money and still have to watch commercials.

It is true that I don't often see shows very soon after they come out, but I'm long since used to being totally out of the loop on most popular culture. Best of all, I get a lot of reading done.

and you can't watch until after the fact.

extremely controlled - They don't let a dime slip through. Yikes - can't even get a game on the radio sometimes without paying. It really sucks for the overall sport(s). It's very short-sighted - average kids can't see anything.

At least here in Canada, maybe Americans had it all along.

But there might be a way to find a live feed for sports from one of the networks through Youtube?

loophole. We can have up to five sign-ons for HBO go and Showtime. So they are two and watch on computer or believe HBO hooks further into tv.

do you have a friend/relative with it?

The network evening news has been the linchpin of my day all my life. I consider it getting "the official version" of reality. But increasingly, I already know everything on it because I read it on the inner tubes.

But I gotta have a way to get the NFL. One poster suggested I go to a sports bar, but that's not how I like to watch.

And I'm just a bit hesitant about all these durned new-fangled contraptions. That's part of what's kept me hooked to the big boys; I just turn it on and it's all there.

But I think I have better things to do with my money.

and I can't watch my hometown teams where I am now (I pay extra on Direct TV to do that).

I may look at our account though and see if we can pare down to the minimum plus sports. The problem when I looked before is that they have tiers that include various channels and to get to tennis I have to buy all the tiers under it.

That is the problem with this monopoly control - they totally dictate what you buy. I have to buy 400 other channels to get the one or two I really want to watch. It's crazy and doesn't give the consumer the choices they want - it is only designed to give profit to the owner.

has those channels I could not get, plus all the old shows and series that were actually entertainment. Today on cable, its junk channels , spanish, sports I never watch, disney and sales pitches, often the same show on multiple channels. It is theft, a car payment for nothing I cant get elsewhere.

my bill by a good amount. I got tired of searching through dozens of movie channels and seeing nothing I want to watch. I use Netflix for streaming and ordering moves. I have heard there are ways to stream pirated material like you would watch on premium channels online and it is usually available right after it airs. I also realized I was paying for more internet speed than I need. Even with streaming and multiple devices being used at the same time, 10 Mbps is plenty. I suspect a lot of people are paying for more Internet speed than they need.

. . . Instead, i bought a $25 Digital antenna and a digital-to-analog converter box for about $60. Here in NYC, that gets me all three major networks plus Fox (not that I actually watch Fox), ION, plus a couple of local channels (9 & 11); and PBS (13), and a smattering of various local public access channels. I supplement that with a HuluPlus subscription for all of $8 a month, and I find pretty much whatever else I want to watch online sooner or later (and rarely do I have to wait very long before I can find something). I have to wait about two and a half hours after everybody else to get my daily Maddow fix online, but I don't get home from work until after 11 p.m. anyway, so that's just fine. So I now pay $8/month as opposed to the $149/month I formerly paid to TimeWarner. Sure I get a bit less, but most of what I got from TimeWarner was crap I didn't watch anyway, so I don't feel I've lost much at all, and certainly I haven't lost anything worth paying an extra $141 a month for!

We get a dozen or so channels with our antenna, including a few that we didn't get with cable! We watch a LOT of Rachel, Chris, etc. on msnbc.com, a lot of youtube.com, Amazon.com streaming, and some random stuff found in various places by streaming on a web-friendly tv. Sorry, we don't watch any sports so I can't help you there. Also, we don't have any kids now and if we did I would prefer not to have a tv at all.

Oh, we recently paid $1.99 to watch "Saving Grace" on Youtube. Great movie!

Have you seen Waking Ned Devine?

n/t

Sports: I'm a baseball fan, partner is not. I found a sports bar frequented by like-minded fans. Cost per week: $10-20 for games I want to see. Otherwise, I do radio because baseball on the radio works for me. I don't like football, but I personally find the camaraderie of being with other fans good. Many sports bars will also change a channel to any sport, so if you're into curling or cricket, you've got a good chance of finding a screen.

HBO: the original content is usually on iTunes within 24 hours of broadcast. HBO finally got that memo after so many years of getting pirated. Once you buy it, you own it. Cost per series is around $30 for standard def, which is usually fine. We use an Apple TV for what we want. The replay content shows up on the streaming sites at about the same time it hits HBO.

Netflix streaming covers most series, a rotating catalog of film and original content. You'll pay $10 a month for pretty much all you can consume.

The roku does pretty much the same as the Apple TV but uses Amazon for paid delivery. If you have an amazon prime account, you have access to a selection of TV and film included (usually around 40K titles.) There is significant overlap between the two devices (Netflix, ABC, PBS, hulu plus, mgo, several others) but roku doesn't do iTunes and Apple TV doesn't do amazon. And licensing competition can be a factor. OTOH, each device is only $100. (I've got a roku for my grandmother, because the woman is a compulsive Home shopping/QVC buyer, and since her stroke has lost a lot of impulse control. Cable would kill her financially.)

Our total monthly media costs average $60 for content and $75 for the fastest, widest possible internet pipe (which we would be paying anyway, geeks that we are.) Gran's DSL line is slower and narrower, but it handles 10 hours of streaming a day just fine for $45 a month. Gran piggybacks on my netflix and amazon accounts (mostly to help control the money - she can't have a credit card. See poor impulse control.) She gets about 2 movie rentals a month (rewards for meeting PT goals) and has yet to run out of series on Netflix she wants.

The real advantage to your wallet hits about 3 months in. If you don't see commercials, your buying habits will change. You will start to buy what you need, not what's been sold to you. You'll also find that the narratives flow better when they're not broken up by ads. There's also the active consumption piece -- without cable, you have to actively decide what you want to watch. It's harder to channel surf and near impossible to be a passive receptor of whatever happens to be on. Gran is watching less TV and interacting more with people, which is great for her. (She's in assisted living; before she lived alone and consumed a lot of HGTV, QVC and HSN.) However, she's not a sports fan so that's no loss for her. She's found others who love her same soap opera, so they have commandeered one of the community rooms for a daily soap fest.

I personally like the Apple TV interface & remote better, but it's a tiny thing that can easily be lost. The roku remote is larger, but very simple, and has a lanyard. Both are robust little devices that don't require much in terms of tech savvy.

The first couple weeks will itch, but it goes away pretty fast.

he would receive everything he wanted. WRONG! We did receive about 30 channels and I also subscribe to Netflix, but he wanted to watch several channels that air mostly "old" tv shows like Gunsmoke etc. I would have dealt with it, but I would really have missed watching MSNBC, and the Discovery Channel.

As far as hubby went, the rooftop lasted less than 24 hrs. before he said take it down!

I have a friend with a simple antenna and a newer tv and he has quite a few channels. NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, CW, PBS from two markets, ION, My Network TV, Antenna TV, THIS tv, TBN, ME tv-heck, here's a list for the Kansas City market, all free with an antenna.

http://www.rabbitears.info/market.php?request=print_market&mktid=38

That gives you an idea of what a smaller market can offer with just an antenna. Check it out with your nearest market:

http://www.rabbitears.info/

I also have a Roku and have had one for years. I love it and am planning on cutting the cord once I find a place in the country, compared to where I live now. There are plenty of crazy channels on Roku-just google "Roku private channels" for an idea. And you can get news on a Roku, depending on what channels you look for.

HBO-maybe buy a season pass to a show on iTunes? I don't know about HBO but I know some who do this for the shows on AMC such as Mad Men and Walking Dead: instead of paying for a cable subscription they buy season passes on iTunes and see the shows shortly after airing, usually after 24 hours. Much cheaper than paying for cable.

I'm probably down to about 6 hours of broadcast and cable viewing a week. Liberating.

I really enjoy the old shows and movies I get with the antenna.

nt

that does not sound right.

if you watch it to begin with, you'd have to find a way to keep HBO, as far as I know.

I don't see how "cutting the cable" makes a difference.

It's NOT a big deal. Just cut it off and get one of those "new" flat antennas- you'll be fine. Seriously, we could give a damn about cable.

and threaten to leave them if they won't do it. You have to be ready to leave them of course.

The services you mentioned are all through the internet. Look for services with NFL, and a box like roku or apple tv that will support the internet channels you want. There are lots of internet channels. Sports are often the most difficult part of cord cutting but there are options.


http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/11/04/how-i-did-the-impossible-hbo-without-cable-tv/

http://lifehacker.com/the-biggest-myths-about-cutting-the-cable-cord-1566140265

I have Roku and a couple of the usual channels, but I also have no moral qualms using torrent sites such as piratebay.se for broadcast tv. All you theoretically need is reasonable internet speed, nothing special 10MBps is fine. Almost all mainstream popular shows are uploaded to the torrent sites the night they air. mtorrent (lower case mu; no idea how to get symbol font here) is a free download as is a get private vpn if you have one of those internet providers who police downloads. Neither requires any IT skill to download and set up at all. I pay about 30/mo for internet and 16 for NF/Hulu.

Chromecast is worth a look too unless you are one of those ifanboys who refuse to use Google stuff. If it's streamed on the internet it can be sent to your TV. <$30 at Amazon.