A little over a year ago I joined a growing group of people that are eschewing the cable monopoly for their viewing entertainment. After many years of being a faithful, if sometimes unwilling, cable subscriber, I realized that there was no financial sense to subscribe to a channel lineup consisting of roughly 80 stations simply to enable my self to obtain the content from 8-10 of those stations.
Over the years I had slowly upgraded one piece at a time so that I had gone from a simple cable box to a home-built MythTV setup to a Tivo HD. Yet after all of these upgrades, I still felt that it was silly to be paying so much money to my local cable provider for so many stations that I never watched.
It was, then, with no small amount of interest that I watched the procession of the Family and Consumer Choice Act of 2007, which was supposed to allow families to choose and pay only for the stations that they wanted. While this grew out of the fervor over the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show where Janet Jackson’s experienced a “wardrobe malfunction”, I was still happy to see that I might finally get a la carte cable. Unfortunately, this bill never made it out of committee, and as of 2008 had not yet made it to the floor for a vote.
It seems that with all of this that my best option for both saving money overall and controlling what my money went too, was to drop the big cable provider and start using DVD rentals, NetFlix and the internet to obtain the programming I wanted to see.
My first step was to procure an easy-to-use method of playing video on the TV screen. While I already had a relatively decent DVD player, I had begun to transfer a large portion of my DVD collection to a hard drive connected to my Mac laptop so that I could switch movies more easily. Thus, in November of 2008 I purchased an AppleTV at the Apple Store in Lenox Square Mall while on holiday to visit my friends in Atlanta.
After setting up the AppleTV and connecting it to my iTunes library, I embarked on a long journey towards completely digitizing my music and movie collection. This combined with the ability to buy or rent movies and television shows from Apple, went a long way towards my goal of being able to get the majority of the content I wanted without a monthly fee to Mediacom Cable.
Still there was a large chunk missing: live television broadcasts of both dramatic content and live events. My next post in this series will detail the steps I took to alleviate those holes using the AppleTV as a basis for some ingenious hacking.