Well, it was fun while it lasted. After less than one month of experimentation, our family are no longer “cord cutters”. It came down to a great deal from Verizon, we were able to add our TV service back (with a few less channels) for only a few dollars more than we were paying for just internet and phone service each month. This was a fun, challenging, and ultimately discouraging experience. I plan on writing in more detail about some of my experiences in the future but here’s a quick rundown of what impressions I was left with about the world of non-cable TV video entertainment.
- The Mohu Leaf is great
If you are looking to receive channels over the air, the Mohu Leaf Plus was the best antenna we found. We were able to get in just about every channel with the other antennas we tried but they required constant adjustment every time we wanted to change the channel. This wasn’t going to work for my grand scheme of setting up our iMac as a DVR because a DVR that you have to manually adjust an antenna for is pretty much useless. We tried antennas from Radio Shack, Best Buy, and Target. The Leaf obliterated them all because we were able to find a good position for it where we did not need to adjust it at all. We were able to get in all the green coded channels we found on the dtv.gov website, and the red, blue and voilet coded channels we found on the antennaweb.org website. I would easily recommend this to anyone looking for a good indoor antenna.
- There are a suprising number of channels available
Including sub-channels we ended up getting 47 channels in on our last channel scan. This was exciting and it is a lot but the bad news is that it seemed that around 75% were either religious or spanish channels. But I do have to say that we were always able to find something to watch if we wanted to just sit down and relax with the TV on. It just wasn’t what we would normally want to watch.
- The EyeTV software is buggy
I’m willing to blame my years old iMac here if I felt it was totally to blame, but I found the EyeTV software to be impressively innovative but horribly implemented. I’ll write about this at greater detail in a later post but the user interface was horrendous to try to navigate through using a remote. There should be a lot more keyboard commands (which you can easily map to remote using Remote Buddy). It kind of became a joke between my wife and I, we would take bets about what the software would do if we pressed enter because it is so un-intuitive that you never know what it is going to do. I tried a little searching and found no better alternatives for the Mac for PVR software. I would have been open to Windows or Linux based options as well but the only computer we had to use for this was our main computer on which we need to have Mac OS.
- The HD HomeRun was pretty neat
One breath of fresh air in this sometimes excruciating experience was our HD HomeRun. This is a cool little device that connects to your antenna and your network, then any computer on your network can access it to get a TV stream. This thing was super easy to setup but unfortunately it was hindered by the disappointing EyeTV software we were using to watch it.
- The Roku is junk
I really wanted to like the Roku. We’ve had an Apple TV for almost a year and have liked it but I’m getting sick of waiting for Apple to let developers write apps for it. So, I was excited about trying the Roku. Unfortunately all the apps seemed to really suck. One of my biggest pet peeves was that you can’t start playing music in Pandora, then do something else like look at pictures or use another app that doesn’t interfere with the music. After a few days we took the Roku back and are happy to have our Apple TV.
- I love my FiOs Multi-Room DVR!
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. During our experiment there were times when I was stressing out about getting everything working and I would reminisce about how nice it was when everything just worked. It was so nice tonight to just sit down and watch a few TV shows without having to worry about the computer not cooperating or whether or not the software would behave as expected. While it is by no means anywhere near the cutting edge of DVRs, the FiOs software is pretty good for a cable company provided solution. I still miss our old TiVo HD but definitely appreciate the On-Demand features and lower monthly expense of the FiOs DVR.
Well, here we are, back where we started. I’m glad we had the opportunity to try this little experiment but unfortunately it just seems that the services and devices that are touted as replacements for traditional pay TV service are just not there yet. I hope that we do see some major innovations in this realm in the next year or so. I think consumers want to be able to dump their cable TV service and would if there was something that you could just plug in, turn on, and use that would have most of the content they want, maybe Apple will have something to fit this void later this year?
Last week, my wife and I took the leap and cancelled the video service portion of our FiOs service. We had many reasons for doing this, the main reason being to cut our monthly costs. We are planning on relying on Netflix, Hulu, various network websites, over the air tv, and iTunes for our entertainment needs. In our living room we have an Apple TV, Xbox 360, iMac, internet connected Blu-ray player, and a crappy antenna all connected to our TV. So far it has been an adventure, I’d like to take a minute to briefly share a few thoughts on our experience so far.
One of the biggest hassles has been figuring out what programming is available where, when it is available, and for how long it is available. Luckily I had a handy list of the programs that we had set up to record on our DVR. I went though this list and searched Netflix, Hulu, various network websites, and iTunes to see where our favorite shows were available. Of the 25 shows I researched, 23 are available on iTunes, 15 are available on the airing network’s site, Hulu has an unpredictable jumble of random episodes for some shows, clips for others, and nothing at all for a few. Netflix had no current seasons of these shows available but 13 of the shows do have past seasons available. Looks like using the iMac on the big screen tv will likely be the most useful viewing tool, or air playing from the iPad to the Apple TV in some cases.
So, this has been a learning process for us so far. The biggest thing we miss is the simplicity of turning on the DVR and selecting from a list of recorded shows. I would love to see something like this, even if it would just have links to the website you could watch the show. This may be a fun project for me if I can’t find anything to accomplish this. I have plenty more to write about this experience so look for more posts coming soon with some tips for others looking to cut the cord.
When I first heard that there was going to be an authorized biography of Steve Jobs coming out this year I was a little interested but skeptical that it would be as harshly honest as the unauthorized Jobs biography I read years ago (iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business). I’ll admit that in the midst of the hysteria and nostalgia after the recent death of his Steveness, my interest was heightened. I was especially interested in seeing if someone could write an authorized biography of the man without getting ensnared in his famous “reality distortion field”.
It took me two weeks, but I finally finished the book and was surprised by some of the impressions it left me with. I thought I’d share a few of them here.
Just because you can be a jerk doesn’t mean you should be one. To anyone who knows much of the history of the technology industry and Apple it comes as no surprise that Steve was a grade-A douchebag much of the time. I felt that the book did an average job exploring this but at times it seemed to excuse it as just part of the package. While the feeling you’re left with from the author is that Steve’s personality flaws helped make him successful, I personally was left wondering how much more successful he would have been if he had just a little more tact and grace and a little less prickliness.
Never underestimate the appeal of simplicity. Steve Jobs never invented anything but was instead successful in refining what already existed. Sorry for stating the obvious here, but that is an incredible fact to focus on. Apple has become an insanely successful business based not on specs but on experience. As you may have figured from the title of this blog, I like simplicity and enjoy making things simpler. I passionately feel that those of us in the tech industry owe it to the rest of the world to go the extra mile to not make great technology but make great technology easy to use. None of this was a new concept to me from reading this book but it just allowed for a very interesting meditation on the appeal of simplicity, not just in technology. This, and the adoption of the Intel processor, is what attracted me to the Mac OS. As much as I enjoy getting lost in technology, I enjoy technology that just works even more.
Priorities are important. I don’t want to come off as judging Steve Jobs for his decisions in life, but I was somewhat horrified to learn how bad of a father he could be. Of course it is easy for me to say that from the perspective of being the father of a two year old, I know I’ll make mistakes over time with my son, but knowing how I feel toward my wife and son I couldn’t fathom not putting them first no matter how important my job was. Reading about this aspect of Steve’s life really made an impact on me. Hopefully, I have plenty of time left on this earth but I would feel like a complete failure if I died and had to rely on a book written about me to let my kids know what I was up to while they were growing up and I wasn’t around.
All in all, it was a very entertaining and informative book. It was fun to see what Steve’s side of the story was in many of the legends that have been spun about him. At times it can be a very emotional book, it’s hard to read about his family and not think of the loss they’ve suffered. I’m glad I took the time to read it, and I’m glad I got to live in the same world as Steve Jobs for almost 27 years.
