Society9.com

How I ditched cable and replaced the void with awesomeness from the internet!

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I was pay­ing quite a bit every month on cable (DirecTv to be pre­cise). And yet, I was hardly inter­ested in Jer­sey Shores and gigan­tic bugs on SyFy. What­ever hap­pened to Star Trek and Twi­light Zone? It was time to ditch DirecTv.

So here’s how I did it.

1. First, I man­aged to find a way to can­cel my DirecTv sub­scrip­tion with­out pay­ing an Early Ter­mi­na­tion Fee (I hate those fees!).

2. Next, I have an HDTV and wanted HD con­tent on my TV with­out hav­ing to pay for it. Did you know you get free over-the-air HD? My local chan­nels and few other ones are all broad­cast over the air in High Def­i­n­i­tion for free! But how do you get these chan­nels? Buy a rab­bit ear antenna.

Society9 Tip: There are tons of antenna’s out there specif­i­cally made for HDTVs. They are no bet­ter than the cheap­est antenna which costs about $10. How to I know? I bought two - the Trek indoor ampli­fied high def­i­n­i­tion antenna for off-air hdtv recep­tion which runs to about $40 bucks and the vanilla rab­bit ear antenna from RCA which is less than $10. Tried both. I actu­ally got bet­ter recep­tion off the $10 antenna than the $40 one! Seri­ously. And the $40 antenna requires addi­tional power!

Society9 Tip: Any basic rab­bit ear antenna will be able to pick HD recep­tion. You don’t have to buy an antenna made spe­cially for HD recep­tion. Don’t buy into mar­ket­ing hype.

3. So I was watch­ing local chan­nels includ­ing PBS in glo­ri­ous HD for free! I wanted more! Net­flix to the res­cue! If you have Net­flix, you can watch on-demand movies streamed directly to your PC or Mac. And if you are not aware, PC/Macs can be con­nected directly to your hdtv with what’s called a HDMI cable. (the PC/Mac side might have a dif­fer­ent port — for exam­ple Mac has the Mini-display port — I had to get the mini-display-to-hdmi cable which runs about $7).

4. If you like this route of con­nect­ing your laptop/computer or spare com­puter to your hdtv, the pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less. Check out Hulu, Boxee

5. What about the remote? I have an iPod touch and that thing serves as an excel­lent remote! I use Hip­poRe­mote but there are tons of remote apps avail­able. Works beau­ti­fully! (And free!)

6. Or if you pre­fer a phys­i­cal remote, check out this mul­ti­me­dia remote with keyboard

_{Link pro­vided for con­ve­nience. I don’t own this remote.}

7. What if you don’t like a com­puter con­nected to your TV? You could buy this lit­tle box called ROKU. This sits between your TV and your router and comes with its own remote. Has a num­ber of free and paid chan­nels includ­ing Net­flix and Amazon’s on-demand-video. Highly rec­om­mended. Has 4 and a half stars from over 700 reviews.

There you have it! Do I miss TV? Not one bit! I love watch­ing those old Alfred Hitch­cock shows on Hulu! Couldn’t get that with reg­u­lar TV!

If you have any ques­tions, tech­ni­cal or oth­er­wise, feel free to post.

Incom­ing search terms:

• cable void
• ditch directv
• how void cable
• more than one roku tied to a net­flix account
• replace direct tv with roku
• twi­light zone directv

Tags: cable, directv, ditch cable, internet tv