Just cut the direct tv bill..... it is gone. Am looking at adding rabbit tv. So far all the reviews I've seen (that I remotely 'trust') list the 'cons' as things that I can and would accept. For example- I know they don't have your standard tv channels. Programs are not live..... i get it.

That aside....anyone have any personal experience? Thanks.

CJK... I live about 35miles north of Tampa on the coast... I have a "rabbit ear" antenna as part of my hurricane supplies if that is what you are referring to... with a small digital portable TV I get about 8 channels (a couple in Spanish)

No, but thanks.I'm referring to Rabbit TV. A small 10 dollar USB drive that gives you 'access' to free online TV. It is basically a USB with the links to the sites. I know you could get it all for free by doing it yourself but for 10 dollars, the ease of it is a better option in my book. Thanks for the reply. BTW what TV is that in the pic. Is it good? Does it take standard batteries? Where did you get it? I'm looking for that too. Thanks.

CJK... sorry, I'm from the older generation that doesn't keep up with technology, but assumed it was not what you were referring to...the TV is an Insignia LCD model NSL7HTV-10A... the LiIon battery does not appear to be serviceable without completely removing the back panel...I got it after the transition from analog to digital service, so have only used it for trial...

I would investigate:

(1) Buy a Roku. The "Roku 1" model is sufficient for most folks needs and is only $49 http://www.roku.com You can typically buy a Roku locally, at a Best buy or a Walmart, if you don't want to order online.

(2) Install "Plex Media Server" (free) on your PC. http://www.plex.tv

(3) Then go to places like these (and there are many others available):

(3a) http://watchseries.lt/
(3b) http://www.solarmovie.so/
(3c) http://watchfreemovies.unblocked.co/
(3d) http://watch32.com/

... and download movies, TV shows, etc. to your local PC. This is easiest to do using Firefox as your web browser with one of the many available "downloader" Firefox plugins. Personally, I like "Flash Video Downloader", which despite it's name, does much more than just Flash.

(4) Install the (free) Plex channel on your Roku.

(5) Stream those downloaded movies/shows from your PC running Plex Media Server to the Roku device hooked up to your TV.

Of course the Roku can stream stuff from NetFlix, Hulu, etc. directly, all by itself, without needing Plex Media Server. But there are things you can't get there that you may well find in the (3) websites above.

Once you get into Plex, you can learn more advanced stuff like having it transcode videos that are of wrong formats for your target device (the Roku), channels like "Let Me Watch This" and "IceFilms", etc. That comes a little later as you learn.

p.s. - I used to have a "Rabbit" years (decades?) ago to send stuff from downstairs to my upstairs TVs. That was a very old Rabbit, before they were wireless (I had to run a wire pair from downstairs to upstairs). It worked "OK" for what it was, and for the technology available at the time. I'm sure the new Rabbits are unrecognizeable from the old Rabbit I used to have.

Biggest scam in the market.

If you want to stream free tv, go to the network sites (e.g. NBC.com, CBS.com) or use Hulu.com.

It's spyware, too. Really, don't use this thing. We got one as a joke at work (a big chunk of my work is in media and entertainment) and it installs all kinds of crap on your system.

MartinFocazio - Are you saying that the Rabbit is a scam/spyware, or that Plex/Roku that I mentioned is spyware?

If it's the latter, then I will say that I've never had any issues with Plex. But then I run Linux, and spyware/malware doesn't normally exist there (technically it could, you just don't see it much in real life). Besides, Plex comes as a Linux-native application, it's not a Windows-native application being emulated on Linux like some other things are.

Rabbit is a "scam" in that it does nothing you can't do at www.canistreamit.com for free, it installs stuff on your hard drive that monitors what you're doing and it's typically way out of date.

Plex and Roku are the best thing that ever could happen to a television. I'm a HUGE Roku fan, and Plex is very popular in my office.

If you're looking to get away from the pay TV bundle model and move into the free and pay-per-program model, you can't do much better than a Roku box.

If anyone wants to know more about living without cable TV, please let me know.

I wish I could, but we have to have internet and the wife insists on a home phone. So it turns on that buying all three services is about the same price as buying two. But it sure gets frustrating paying for and flipping through hundreds of channels with nothing worth watching.

The only thing keeping me from "cutting the cord" is my wife's infatuation with NHL hockey (well, any kind of hockey - she plays herself as well!) You don't find streaming sports, not major ones anyway, outside of traditional cable/satellite providers. There are NHL streaming packages you can buy where you can stream tons of hockey games, but for some bizarre reason they exclude your local teams games - which are of course the ones you want to watch in the first place!

Thats the whole fcc thing. Local stations went to the fcc when satellite was becoming popular and claimed they would loose advertising dollars and got the law passed that anything on a local station has to be blocked on non local connections.

www.hidemyass.com will make your computer seem like it's anywhere you want it to be. I use them and despite their ridiculous name, they are reliable, reputable and effective.

Verizon Home Phone Connect: http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/device/home-phone-connect

I replaced my landline after Sandy with this thing. Best thing I ever did. Cell service is MUCH MORE reliable than CableCo VoIP or local wireline provider. My home phone bill is now $26.00 a month.

Your ISP is definitely hiding lower-price "internet only" offers. How to find them? Call and cancel service. Tell them you'll "consider" keeping your internet connection only and all of the sudden they find $45 a month plans.

Problem is internet only + $26 for home phone = $10 less than bundle price for all three.

I keep checking on verizon fios hoping combining cell phone into the mix would cut costs too but it hasn't been available yet plus Verizon just introduced their new more (expensive) plan and switched me over and I'm trying to get switched back as is will cost $20 more per month and give less data.

I travel to the UK quite a bit and they have this thing called a "free market" for telecommunications.

Check this out - here's pricing for broadband connections near my UK office:

http://www.moneysupermarket.com/broadband/deals/E17HY/

£1 = $1.66

$50 a month gets you unlimited internet and phone for the most part.

I thought about masking my true IP address by bouncing through a relatives computer in another state (easy enough to do). It appears that "hidemyass" is just a commercialized (albeit, free) way to accomplish the same end result by using a proxy.

I did check with "NHL Game Center Live" support and they confirmed that you are able to watch all your local team games, but only AFTER a 48 hour blackout period has expired. You can rewind time and watch every game in its entirety once you've waited that two day penalty period. So if you don't mind a two day delay after a game has been played before you get to watch it, you don't need to go through the extra step of masking your true IP address. Still, waiting two days doesn't work very well when all the folks at your office are talking about the results of last nights game that you have not been able to watch yet.

But despite the potential hassles of trying to watch games by streaming, $49 per year for NHL Game Center Live is a heck of a lot cheaper than a monthly cable/satellite bill, especially since they tend to reserve the local sports channels to the higher priced programming packages. No such thing as a "Basic Cable With Local Sports" package. No siree, it has to be the expensive "America's Favorite 51,734 Channels Plus Local Sports" package before you can get the channels you actually want!

The Pay TV business is just massive and the "bundle" model is so entrenched that it's going to take a long time to unwind.

But it will unwind and it will be more along the lines of how you buy other media products (books, music) - a lower margin business than Pay TV is now, for sure.
The marginal costs of good content are high, and so good content will be expensive, but I expect the media business to evolve into tiers:

"Premium" is ad-free, first run shows. You buy shows by the season for about $40 each. This is how you can get some content today, but there are still time and place limits.
"Regular" is ad-supported first-run shows, you pay about $10 per network per month. This is close to what we have now (most people watch only 8 channels, so video part of your cable bill is about $80 a month)

"Economy" is ad-supported second-run shows. Ads are unkippable (like Hulu.com today.

And boy do folks moan about it!

I once had a business customer call in to moan about his slow FTTC Broadband. He was getting around 79 Meg/sec after getting him to plug his Gigabit Ethernet port on his PC to the Gigabit Ethernet port on his router.
I also checked his usage. His monthly usage was over 4 Tera Bytes so it couldn't have been that slow in the previous weeks.

As for the Pay TV model of watching TV, why bother? If we have total and utter drivel to watch in the UK, why on earth are you bothering in the USA. Music, Film, TV and other media has seriously declined in quality in the last 20 years.

There's a lot of TV out there. And there's a lot of very seriously bad TV, the kind of TV that causes brain damage and should be illegal to show to POWs. However, there is some good TV out there, more honestly than ever before. And it's getting easier to find the good TV, especially if you have some form of digital on demand service available.

Popular music is largely awful. One of the cool things about the Internet is that there's a lot more music available without major labels serving as gatekeepers. Good music can be found.

Nope. You've gotten older. All older people deride the media of the current generation. (Elvis was widely derided as "crap" as were the Beatles) In fact, we're in the "best ever" days of television.

Consider:
Breaking Bad
Game of Thrones
Mad Men
Orphan Black

Compare this to "The Flying Nun" or "Benny Hill" or "Chips" or "Married with Children" or really any number of other drivel. Shows like M*A*S*H were the far outliers in the past. Today shows like "Sherlock" are orders of magnitude better in terms of production value, creative content and acting than so much that came before. YOU may not be the market, but objectively (by market share) and subjectively (by critical and audience engagement) TV is attracting the best of the best in terms of creative talent.

This article really goes into it deeply:
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/box-seat/how-tv-got-so-good-20130320-2gfd7.html

As does this:
http://guyism.com/entertainment/movies/m...all-screen.html

What's considered "good" is definitely defined by your age. When I was young, the Led Zeppelin that I liked was considered way out there by my parents, but now I hear it on elevators.

When I go to an NHL hockey game, they often have a choice of three songs to "play next" during intermissions. The audience gets to vote (with applause volume when the songs are announced). It is almost always the "oldie" of the group of songs wins. Probably because, by-in-large, us old people are the only ones who can routinely afford the expensive NHL tickets.

I have fond memories of watching the "Get Smart" TV show with my family when it was originally aired. Somehow, I think if I watched it again now, I would say, "What a idiotic show!"

I was into rock-n-roll in my youth. Now I'm into Beethoven, Debussy, Liszt, Brahms, Chopin ... times change. We get old (which kind of sucks, but the alternative is worse).

There are a few contemporary exceptions of course, but there were so many great TV shows back in the 1970s, 80s and 90s in the UK, many you wouldn't of heard off in the USA.

The Ascent of Man
Portahouse Blue
Survivors (1975)
The Sweeney
The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
Hamish McBeth
I, Claudius
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
The Beiderbecke Affair.
Edge of Darkness
Quatermass (1979)
Coupling
Cracker
Rebus
Callan
Boys from the black stuff

I could go on and on. Believe me there was nothing wrong with the acting on these TV shows. I would actually re rather watch 'Blakes 7' than Battlestar Galactica (2004-209) even without the glossy high production values.

I also do not like the levels of violence especially in todays American TV shows. If they ever made a remake of Columbo today there would probably by a SWAT team in tow.

I won't even get onto the state of the music today.