Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Finally canned the satellite provider

The day they allow ala carte is the day I might reconsider, but I wouldn't hold my breath....

Ditto, not dido.

I'm a charter cable user. Phone, inanet, tv. The last billing cycle jumped $31. PMO. I did a package downgrade, eliminated some channels. Now am $10 lower than b4 billing increase. Still high imo.

As of today a UFO now hovers over the north end of my roof. Installed a flat/round Winegard omni-directional hdtv antenna. 42 channels, some are junk channels though.

Just might fire Charter tv, but keep inanet & phone. Phone is a sweet deal, unlimited north America for $5 a month. If I ditch the tv I'll have an extra $50 month for stuff that needs buying.

Rabbit ears work for us. We get ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, PBS, a 24 hour per day movie channel, a channel that shows old teeeveee series, plus a couple of Mexican channels, a home shopping channel, and a couple of religious channels.

We don't watch half of what we cen get, so the rabbit ears are just fine.

L.W.

I use rabbit ears and get ABC, NBC, Fox, CBS, RetroTV, This movies and three PBS.
ESPN on my laptop. All for free.
I do miss the old days of pirating satellite. 999 channels on each of the two birds I could hit.

OK, please 'splain this to me. Does ROKU piggyback off of your Internet service, or does it need an Internet service of it's own? What about signal strength?

we went to a roku several years ago when we dropped direct tv due to cost. we needed a roku because our non-flat screen tv won't hook direct to the internet. for the roku to work you just need to get internet to it. if you have wireless in your house, you're good to go. I think you can also run a cat 5 cable to the back of the roku box but not sure. but no, no need to pay another internet fee. they we have netflix, amazon prime, hulu, and there's a bunch of free channels like weather and news built into the roku. i get local news from the local tv station's internet page.

another added benefit if you have kids is there's no ads on most of these channels, so my kids are completely satisfied with whatever toys they have. and, because the cartoons stop after each show, they'll turn off the tv and go play.

I had Directv as well and got rid of it due to the cost. Got on the Triple play through Comcast for $100 month (phone,TV and Internet )
After a year they went up to over 200 bucks a month. Thought about canceling but instead I called them and told them my bill was too high and I was going to cancel. We negotiated back down to $130 a month.....try it, no one wants to lose the business

My grown son and one of my grown daughters have just the one internet connection in their homes and each uses a single DSL connection for both PC and downloading streaming movies and television programing. My son uses a control box made by Apple and I'm not sure whether my daughter uses a Roku, a DVD player with streaming capability, or one of the grandkids video game consoles which also is Netflix, Hulu, etc., capable.

I do know they both said they had to upgrade their DSL speed to the next higher level because the slower DSL speed service they originally had often caused programing to stall while buffering to catch up.

What the hell's a ROKU??? Never heard of it..

It's a little box about the size of two decks of cards that lets you run the streaming services like Netflix. Costs about $60.

Yep, they run from about $49-$89 depending on if you want 1080 p or HDMI hook ups or just old RCA. You can get a ROKU at Wal-Mart in the electronics department.

All you need to watch is a high speed internet connection with a wireless modem. When you hook it up you have to use your computer to link(by registration numbers) to either a Pay Pal account or a credit card. It comes with all the standard apps loaded just like any smart TV will have. You then have a couple hundred free channel apps you can load from the channel store and 700+ paid apps for everything you can imagine. There are apps to learn languages or just about anything you are interested in. Most of them aren't particularly great but I think this is definitely the future of TV with so many specialized apps.

Are NFL or College games available with ROKU?

Not that I've found, but I haven't done much searching either. There's really not much live TV (or any) live TV that I've found with the Roku.

Me neither, but I'm not a sports fan at all. You can watch same day "segments" of Fox news but I watch all my news on PC anyway. It's not perfect but you get a lot with a ROKU and Netflix for just $8 a month.

This is an interesting subject to me because I have viewed satellite as cheap entertainment for many years even at 125.00/month.

But that is 1,500.00/year or 15,000.00 over ten years and that is not cheap at all. I have patronized DirectTV since 1995 with a short break between 2006-2007 but I cannot get the new equipment or discounted packages without a fight...so much for loyalty.

I am not even sure if my DSL is sufficient to support streaming movies but I need to look for alternatives to DTV.

My download speed sucks with CentryLink being the only non dialup provider out here in the boonies. Speed is only about 2 mbps but I run the ROKU and Netflix just fine and on 2 TV's at times. A wireless modem is cheap or your provider will likely give you one if you don't have one.

That $1400 savings will buy a very nice rifle every year.

I recently switched from DSL to cable but even with our crappy 3Mb/s DSL (that actually ran at more like 1.5-2 mb/s) we were always able to stream Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Prime in HD

Dave,

We gave dish up in June when I bought the Roku 3 from Amazon and a Clearstream 2 UHF/VHF TV antenna on eBay from a guy in San Antonio who had a bunch for sale. We get more local stations than we need via the antenna. We also have an Amazon Prime subscription and Netflix. The only thing I would really like to have is a bigger selection of sports for College Football on Saturdays.

I have heard that it is possible to get the ESPN broadcasts via a subscription that you can buy for an Xbox 360 but haven't found all the information I need to take the plunge just yet.

We don't miss Dish much as there is always something to watch on local channels, Amazon Prime or Netflix if you just want some entertainment.

Good luck!