Reconnecting The Cord

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.

  1. 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.
     
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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?