I live in Montréal (Lasalle) , me and the wife have been discussing the option of letting go of videotron cable in favor of tv streaming as except for a few shows on TVA or Radio-Canada most of the other things that we are watching are tv series
So what would you recommend in term of hardware and software for a newbie who want to cut cable tv in favor of streaming
I use Windows Media Center + a pair of HDHomeRun 3 tuners, and for "other" TVs, I've got Xbox 360 extenders. That works well. I can watch OTA + Netflix + Hulu on all my TVs.
I cut the cable about a year ago - I use an AppleTV. It has Netflix and any TV shows I’m interested in I just purchase (with the money I saved by cutting cable) and watch again and again without commercials. New shows are delayed by 24 hours after broadcast.
For major OTA network series, the best way to go is OTA. They are free and can be easily recorded with an HTPC or ATSC PVR. Depending on location, US networks and subchannels will also be available. There are other options, such as Hulu an iTunes but they can involve more complicated setups and extra cost. Some services, like Netflix, are relatively cheap, easily available in Canada and are great for some series and movies.
My advise is to really check it out first, I am running XBMC on my computer, for the most part everything is there, I would download xbmc on your computer, see what you get and play with that for a while. If you like it get a media streamer and got disconnect your cable.
I don't think I would find a OTA antenna very useful if I didn't have DVR functionality provided by a HTPC. So, if you're not planning to do the HTPC thing for recording TV shows, I'd probably skip the antenna.
I would recommend Tivo PVR Roamio . It has very good tuner and popular apps like netflix or hulu+
You can also set it up as a whole home PVR and have access to live or prerecorded shows using a tablet.
The only problem is that it could get expensive going that way.
A one time expense and then significantly cheaper than cable over the long term. If you can do without a PVR, which is entirely possible as most content is available online, you could be up and running cable free for very little capital investment.
Yes OTA for HD Local and XBMC for everything else and your in Business for cutting the cord.Use XBMC with Android T.V Box.Ouya also works great for XBMC plugged directly onto T.V HDMI.Netflix is also good.Only thing is a good internet connection with lots of GB is needed but plenty of Companies offering it a lot cheaper then the Well known ones .
Also You may want to check out FTA. There are a few good channels available on it. Price can be <$100 if you know what your doing. But realistic value should be $200 - $500 installed.
(FTA forum http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=57 )
The only idshoe with Streaming are bandwidth caps & bandwidth speed. This may force you into a Premium internet package.
Therefore use all 3.
a little OTA, a little FTA and a little streaming.
Good Luck,
EB
PS. I watch mostly FTA. A little OTA. But no streaming.
This is only true if you're willing to adjust your life schedule around the TV broadcast schedule.
These days, most people aren't willing to do that, so adding a PVR adds a lot of value to broadcast TV where the alternative is that you'd miss most of the best content. Not to mention all the time you save when you can skip over boring bits (e.g. commercials). Saturday Night Live has good content in between a lot of boring/uninteresting bits, so a PVR allows me to scan through and watch the good ~30 minutes without needing to suffer through the rest.
A lot of the Canadian shows are available through the CTV, City, Global web sites without a subscription, but free access to each episode is usually limited to 7 days.
... which is why streaming video services and even PVRs are very attractive.
Ideally all TV should function like Netflix, but a PVR is sort of a half-way hack which requires you to buy a (low-end) PC and large hard drives. The good news is that once you have that equipment it's also the best streaming video device available for watching content like Netflix or Hulu.
Yes, in most cases they do, but the picture and sound quality difference between online episodes and recordings of the same shows made with an OTA PVR is huge - OTA is vastly superior.
I have bell satellite (free preview only) , bell fibe tv and OTA and I do not notice much difference between them . Especially I don't see huge improvement with OTA that some people notice.
Actually SD stations are much worse on OTA than on bell satellite or fibe tv.
OTA quality depends on location. Major centres have high quality because they get a direct feed from the originating studio. Remote repeaters often use DBS satellite feeds so they are, at best, only as good as satellite. I wouldn't say that satellite and cable are vastly inferior to OTA. There is, typically, some deterioration due to extra processing and compression but they can be very good, especially compared to remote OTA repeaters.
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