Guest Post by The Zman
Anytime I mention cord cutting, I get a ton of responses on it. It’s not just about the cultural phenomenon. For a lot of people, the alternatives to the traditional cable model are much better at delivering the desired content. If you think TV is immoral, the solution is simple. Don’t buy a television. If you enjoy some shows and movies, it gets a little more complicated. Given how many times it comes up, I thought it would be worthwhile to post about what I’m doing as a cord cutter. Others can chime in with what they are doing.
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Like a lot of men, I ended up with a cable bill because I liked sports. When I was a kid, there were a few games on a week. Then ESPN came on-line with live sports. Then regional sports networks. Now every league and sport has multiple channels dedicated to showing live events. It is the golden age of TV sports, if the gold standard is measured in quantity, rather than quality.That said, I had all the other stuff on cable so I tried to watch popular shows. It was there and people talked about, so I watched.
My first foray into cord cutting was due to technical issues. I did not have cable for a summer and one of things I noticed is I did not miss it very much. I’ve always been a baseball fan, but listening on the radio is a better way to consume baseball. The other stuff I used to watch, well, I did not miss it. If I felt like watching a movie, I got a disc or watched one of the discs I owned. That’s one of the truths of TV watching I learned. Most of what we watch is re-runs and old movies that we have already watched.
With that in mind, I cut the cord at the same time I bought an Amazon FireTV box. This is a simple little device that lets you access Amazon library of movies and TV shows, over the internet. It plugs into your TV via an HDMI cable and connects to the internet over your wireless. You can also connect it with an Ethernet cable. It also has a simple browser so you can access video on the web, like YouTube. It lets you load apps for other video content providers like Hulu and Netflix. There are a lot of small providers with apps.
I have been a Amazon Prime member for a long time, as I do almost all of my shopping on Amazon. The free shipping pretty much covers the cost of the membership for me. That means I get all of the Prime video, which is old movies and TV shows. For instance, I watched a series called Justified that had gone off the air long before I heard of it. They also have original content and some of it is very well done. Amazon also has a movie and TV show rental service. For most people, Amazon Prime for $90 a year is all they need.
In my case, Amazon is all I needed, but I got curious and sampled some of the other serves and devices just to see what was available. I tried the Hulu live TV service, which is one of the many new services for live TV. Their package has most of the popular cable channels for $40 a month. That also gets you their massive library of old TV shows going back to forever it seems. If you liked Taxi or Three’s Company, you can watch it with your Hulu service. You can also watch Hulu on other devices like phones and tablets.
I gave the DirecTV service a ride and it was buggy as all hell. They say it got better, but my experience was not good. In theory, it should be great as it is an internet version of the DirecTV service, which rated the best of all traditional TV offerings. I know when I used their satellite service, it was fantastic. Their internet option has lots of content, but getting it too work was so frustrating I finally gave up and deleted the app. I was an early adopter so maybe it is better, but I’d recommend Hulu over DirecTV for most people.
Now, if you are not interested in the Amazon ecosystem, then you can use something like Roku. I got one of these free when I signed up for comething. Like the Amazon box, it is a small device that connects to your internet via wireless and to your television through an HDMI cable. The interface is easy to use and the setup is super simple. I had it running in five minutes. That’s really the amazing part of all of these new devices. They are vastly more simple to setup and operate than your old cable box.
Roku does some things really well. It is good at buffering content so even if your internet connection is a little buggy, you get no interruption in the video service. Amazon is not as good at this. It’s also really good at finding content on your PC’s so you can use the Roku to play your music and movie collection in another room. I was really impressed at how well this feature worked. I have a vast music collection so having it available anywhere is nice feature for me. I would imagine the same is true for video collections.
One more thing about the ease of use bit. The new devices are modern, unlike your old cable box. For instance, they use Bluetooth for the remote. You don’t have to point the remote at the box, which means the box can be hidden away for a nice clean look to the TV area. I have mine behind the TV. The remotes are also amazingly well designed. You can navigate everything with a few buttons. The Roku remote has a feature where you can plug headphones into the remote and listen, without disturbing everyone else.
Finally, there is one other thing I’ve been doing. I loaded an app called Kodi on the Amazon FireTV. This is a service that uses add-ons to allow you to see content from anywhere on earth. The legality of this service is dubious, but it is impossible to police. The upshot is you can use Kodi to get all your TV and movies free. You can also watch sporting events from all over the world too. There are two downsides. One is you have fiddle with the installation and configuration. The other is the quality is not always the best.
If you are the sort who enjoys fiddling with stuff, then you can find plenty of on-line guides to setting up the Kodi system. Here’s a guide to installing Kodi on a FireStick. You can get the Fire TV Stick for $40, so you can use it for an experiment without spending much. You can also buy a box that is configured, but people really into this stuff tell me those boxes are mostly junk. My experience is that installing on Amazon took about 30 minutes, most of which was spent watching a video on YouTube. Otherwise, it was simple.
Here’s the thing with Kodi. I have no idea how it is legal or how it could be policed in the future. This has the same vibe as the Napster and LimeWire fads of yesteryear. The technology is designed to circumvent current efforts by the gatekeepers to maintain their monopolies. In the music rackets, the gatekeeprs eventually waged jihad on the users in order to scare people out of using file sharing. It failed, but a lot of people were bullied and hassled by Big Music. You need to assess your risk tolerance before using Kodi.
That’s my cord cutting story.
Talk about calling progress being a return to the stone age! Why in the hell should I have to spend my time loading apps and studying instructional videos to watch my own goddamned television. When I want to watch TV ( usually nowadays because of an active shooter) I want to turn it on and watch not struggle with remotes and apps!
I bought a ‘smart’ TV last year only to find I couldn’t just connect it to the coaxial cable and turn it on. I had to have a ‘box’ from the cable company ( perpetual lease at $8 and change per month) to watch anything. My old CRT TV sits by my bed and I watch it more since it only has one remote and doesn’t tell me I need to ‘update’ the system or do anything but change the channel to see what I want.
We are being played for fools by these tech companies who want us to pay for what used to be free even as they skim the ad revenue that used to pay for the programming!
My idea of cord cutting is to use your TV for target practice, preferably with a 12 gauge. Once this has been accomplished it takes your brain anywhere from 28 days to a year to realize that virtually everything you ever watched on it was fake. Stucky, this includes the Moon Landing. Now you can start experiencing the beauty of reality.
Sandworms and all.
I do like these posts. We’ve cut the cell phone cord after living without a cell phone for four months one year and not missing it for a second. Google voice works just fine for making calls and it’s free. Now we’re looking at killing off DirecTV after their customer service pissed us off for the last time. My problem is also the sports, but going to a bar to watch a football game is always an option. We would love to be smartphone and TV free. After not watching any news for the last two months, we find we are much happier in general. There’s plenty of content on the internet to choose from. Starve the pig, whether its a media company or paying a little as possible in taxes, and maybe they will eventually die.
To be honest I get my news secondhand here and find i already know things Nick sees on Drudge.
I thought this post was about firewood.
It is……….if you don’t have a TeeVee. 🙂
Television is a device that permits people who don’t anything
to watch people who can’t do anything.
I stopped watching TV around 1990. It was crap then and now, with my candle burnt down even further, who the fuck sits and watches this stuff? Once in a while, I’ll pull one of the 3,000+ DVDs/VHS I own and use my almost 30 year old, 40″ Panasonic tube TV to watch something but there’s just too much on my list that I want to do.
To each their own.
I thought it was about erections.
If you have internet you can watch anything nut I still have cable I’m a dumb ass so I’ll stay with it not trying to impress anyone.
I just watched movies on the internet but I let a young man talk me into getting Dish tv.I detest the sports channels but I like TMC , Hallmark , Discovery , History , and A@E .I just wish there was a way to watch These Channels without the Advertisements .For some reason Fucking Negroes have to be in every one of them.Hell ,I would rather see white Liberal Progressive Transexuals in full drag queen makeup then Blacks.
Dish does have DVR capability so you can prerecord shows and skip the commercials, but you have to have a Dish receiver with DVR capability and you have to pay extra for DVR service. I have the VIP722 DVR receiver, it costs an extra $7 a month for the DVR capability and I can watch one prerecorded show while recording up to two others.
I have an Amazon Firestick and a computer guy who loaded Kodi and Exodus for all the latest movies, and comes by every once in a while and does upgrades to get movies in HD, etc. You can load all kinds of other Apps, even XXXodus for all the porn you ever want to watch (no, I don’t) and all kinds of TV programs. Even get my Calm Radio through the Firestick now. Haven’t explored all the possibilities.
I use Kodi almost exclusively but my wife needs that news feed so we keep the direct tv. Kodi is truly a pain in the ass as Zman describes above. Not that it is so hard to set up, but that it constantly changes. Kodi is actually not a service provider. It is, in reality, simply a player that has a lot of different codec’s installed. The thing that it has that other players seem to lack is an ability to link to content providers in the torrent sphere. Torrents are places where people have stored their movies in the cloud and then told everyone where to find them. The movies and TV shows that Kodi provides are actually provided by people who make “builds” and it is these builds that are the link to the movies on the cloud servers. It is the builds that provide the movies and not Kodi so Kodi is clean and can’t be attacked by the (((content creators))). This means that the (((content creators))) have to go after the build creators, which they did early this year. Each time they attack the build creators the build creators morph into some other build which means that you, as a viewer of the content inside these builds needs to load a new version of the build, or the elements within the build, or even the overall Kodi player itself.
There is actually a group of people who in theory spend their free time maintaining the Kodi player. I, being conspiratorially minded, have come to believe that the Kodi team is being paid by Amazon and Microsoft to drive the platforms into the hands of the oligarchs but I can’t really prove that. It is just a supposition from my experience with Kodi recently as the newest version of Kodi only runs on the latest version of windows and the latest version of android. And the older builds are no longer maintained so your old firestick or Minix box will need to be rooted so it can be upgraded so it can play the newest version of Kodi.
All of this just sucks and as Zman points out, the quality is frequently low and many of the links, if not most of the links, don’t work at all. What do you expect? The whole thing is run by 15 year old kids in their mothers basements. OK, they might be more like 28 years old but they are actually in their mothers basements. So what you watch and what you watch it on is not limited to Comcast or DirectTV but everything else has it’s own sets of problems and annoyances and eventually you will come to Min’s perspective. Nothing that (((they))) have to tell you is worth knowing. Cut the cord. Stop buying their lies and live your life the way you want. Buy what you want to buy when you want to buy it. Watch what you want to watch when you want to watch it. And try to make sure that their (((business model))) doesn’t work for them. They can dish it out but you can decide whether to take it or not.
I stopped reading at “I do most of my shopping at Amazon”. Bezos is intermittently the richest man in the world. He bought the Washington Post just to influence politics. He’s all mobbed up with the CIA and he’s on the cusp of working out a deal where he’ll get to skim billions off of US Defense procurement while pushing for the globalist open-borders agenda. Then this asswipe “Zman” has the chutzpah to bitch about immigration and our social ills while patronizing one of the most maleficent bastards in the country.
True TV cord cutting is not watching ANY of the “entertainments” that are being peddled out there. Free or not.
For the most part I’ve given up tv. I watch a few nature shows or “reality” homesteading/off grid programs.
I find it much more informative and entertaining to read TBP and other sites.
News, humor, commentary and sparkling wit all in one place!
Your alternatives all seem to require internet. My internet connection is barely enough to read TBP and watch the occasional 3 minute youtube video (I let the video load while I’m reading TBP) so streaming TV alternatives or phone alternatives isn’t going to happen. Over the air TV is also not an alternative for me. Since they went to digital the one TV station that I could get if I positioned the rabbit ears just so in the upstairs bathroom is no longer attainable with an inside antenna. The hassle of installing a giant antenna on the roof for the possibility of getting that one station just isn’t worth it. They still haven’t installed cable TV in my area so it’s not a viable option either. I’m certainly not going to pay for the mile and a half of cable from the main road.
I’ve had Dish Network for years now. The last time I was laid off I called them with an ultimatum – I couldn’t afford to keep their service unless it was under 20$ a month, including DVR capability (normally 6$ extra). They put me on their lowest plan, the “Welcome” plan, and credited me $5 a month for a year, so it just squeaked under the $20 a month at that point. The “Welcome” plan is usually not described on their web site, so you have to know about it and I’m not sure that they’d let people who aren’t long time customers stay on it long term. Current price $27 a month including DVR (the $5 credit ran out years ago). It gets me all the local channels (except when Dish is fighting with one of the networks like now) and a smattering of other channels including ESPN which I never watch but might be useful for those who watch TV for the sports.
My cell phone is a flip-phone on a pay as you go plan that is no longer offered by Verizon, so sooner or later I won’t be able to continue it. I have to put a minimum of $100 a year on the phone. I’m charged $2 a day for any day that I use the phone for calls, but I can use the phone as much as I want for that $2. Cell service at my house is worse than the internet so I normally only use the phone when I’m out running errands or such.
Have you considered carrier pigeons?
Tried ’em once.
Tastes like chicken.
http://www.wonews.com/Blog.aspx?id=2380
So that is where you find out what it sounds like when the doves cry?
First, get yourself an HD antenna for free local shows for stations within about 50 miles or so.
For sports (espn), I got SlingTV for $20 bucks a month plus a free Roku, and no contract. I will cancel it after the college football season. For an extra $5 you can add cloud dvr for most channels (not espn)
Then get Netflix, which is on the Roku remote plus Youtube and Amazon.
Done. 32 bucks a month during football season, 12 bucks a month the rest of the year.
It took me years to convince my family to cut the cord. Our house went from the Comcast Xfinity Triple Play (high speed internet, phone, and cable TV); to just high speed internet ($90/month), Smart Talk VOIP for the phone ($17/month), and a ROKU TV. We saved enough to pay our annual $1300/year property tax! In the next few weeks we’ll be ending the VOIP and just using our Tracfone cell phones, which we already own and cost us about $5.50 per month. There is nothing on TV that any of us miss at all, and the free world of RUKU provides more than enough free programming to last us all the rest of our lives. I wish we had done this years ago. I can only imagine the tens of thousands of dollars we paid Comcast during the last few decades!
If you “cut-the-cord” and then merely re-connect via Roku/wireless, etc., you’ve really pretty much done nothing. Yeah, you’re saving some $ but you’re still connected to their media ecosystem of thought control.
We have so much deadfall it is hard to feel a sense of urgency regarding firewood. However, the light above my gas flame stove will be missed when the cords are finally severed.
Shoot Maggie, with today’s efficient LED lighting you can basically wire your whole house with a 12 volt circuit to run lights off of a very small solar system. I’m not sure how it would work in a log home but in a regular stick built house it would be very easy to wire every room (and your range hood) with a nice LED light that could possibly even be built into each of your existing fixtures. Only an extra switch for each light would be visible in each room.
That is a real possibility. We didn’t want to go full solar and wind prior to building, but now, we could gradually get off grid.
Cut the cord last year. No pain for me. I hope their wallet is hurting a little. I encourage you all to starve the beast.
If you search on it, there has been a dramatic increase in cord cutting across the country over the last few years. Many tens of millions.
Yuge debacle for cable companies the last couple of months; thanks, kneelers.
I finally got the sexy mulatta to agree to survive on the Sling Latino package.
Modem $70
Router $140
Magic Jack $36
Roku (4 ea) $150
Previous cable bill $240
Current
Internet $65
Sling $29
Net effect: sexy mulatta has Univision news and she is thrilled with her new find on Sling TV; HOLA TV is nothing but fashion shows. Wow.
We get CBS, NBC, a few old Western channels like GRIT and CW, and if I climb up the ladder and swing on the antenna, we can get ABC out of Paducah.
We’re neighbors from the sound of it. My antenna on a 40’ pole pulls in stations from Jackson and Paducah nicely.
Cut the cord last year. No pain for me. I hope their wallet is hurting a little. I encourage you all to starve the beast..
i cut the cable last summer & i don’t miss it a bit–
however,i find that i am missing current events because unless i’m out somewhere reading the paper or listening/watching media all i’m hearing about is here on tbp–
what internet sites do ya’ll go to for unbiased news?
I’ve been working on the wife for several years trying to get her to give up cable TV. I’ve been pointing out how the commercials and shows tend to depict blacks and other minorities as smart, hardworking and virtuous while they depict whites as dumb and lazy.
I researched and made a list of options that I emailed to her sometime back and last night she shocked me by extolling the good points of some of the options and telling me they will be better and cheaper than cable. I suspect it won’t be long before she’s ready to kick comcast to the curb.
As an added bonus I can now get a land line with a true fiber optic connection for my phone/innerwebs and then I can get rid of my cell phone too! Life continues to improve for ‘ol I_S! Now if I can just book passage off this rock on the next alien sewage barge to pass by Earth all will be right with the Universe! Maybe I can convince the aliens I encounter to come back to Earth at some point and use politicians, central bankers, elites and child molesters for random target practice?
This explains it .You were molested by aliens from outer space .Damn Indent ,I knew you had problems with your private parts and this is the reason.
I can help you .I will wave my fee just because you have special needs.Now don’t hesitate to ask. I’m your friend.
bb,
you be sure to have an assistant with you at all times when dealing w/the indecent winker–those who are molested by aliens tend to want to do the same,and winker is probably the same and i hear he keeps krytonite with him–
hey indecent,where’ve you been lately-did you relapse and get recommitted?
Tampa, Nope. The evil entity formerly known as my mother died so I’ve been busy. On top of that I just sold a house, bought more guns, and I’m still doing battle with IDH&W. Oh yeah, a guy at work is away on business so I’m working 12-13 hour days too. I still haven’t finished the fucking eclipse article either.
The nut house banned me. They aid I was a bad influence on everyone there and I enjoyed the drugs WAY too much. Can you believe that shit!!??
😉 😉 😉 😉 😉
sorry to hear about your mom,i know you’ve had a hard time dealing with her but you were a good son and did your duty–
we don’t need an article,just the pics,preferably with beautiful females between the lens and the sun–
saw the post on the other thread about your brother and the bumper sticker–it was good but nobody will see it on sat night—re post it another day and give more chuckles to everybody–
“we don’t need an article,just the pics,preferably with beautiful females between the lens and the sun–”
Well, there was one that the wife got in the way on………
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It was her first eclipse, she got excited and started acting a fool. Whatcha gonna do right?
“what internet sites do ya’ll go to for unbiased news?”
TBP
The Drudge Report
Knuckledraggin’ My Life Away
ZeroHedge
All the rest are biased, but soon you pick up what they are and can filter
Regular TV is for Dindos. Every Friday, Greg Hunter at USAwatchdog.com does a 30 minute news report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J50g_5Fb-ks. I like to go to Youtube (some Conservative stuff and tons of recommended crap) and enter Yellowstone, Earthquake, Economic Collapse, Prophecy, etc. Dollarcollapse.com has economic articles.
I cut the cord around 1985 or so & still have the same TV. It works fine except for the widescreen stuff is kind of compact up & down. The VHS tapes started self destructing a few years ago & the player gave up the ghost, so I’ve graduated to DVDs. Goodwill, etc. have a decent selection of DVDs.
There are full movies, old concerts, & all kinds of stuff on YouTube & a few other sites for free if I need a change. The (((beast))) gets nothing from me other than clicks on YouTube.
Haven’t had cable for years. We got a demo model TV from wally at a substantial discount (works just fine), plug in a laptop (screen is busted, but it works just fine), and run utub, Amazon Prime, or torrents on it. We get the content we want, fewer commercials, and we aren’t paying for the O channel, the Nigerian one, NHK, or the one religious channel with the woman who puts on makeup with a trowel and looks suspiciously like Miss Piggie. Screw the cable company. Amazon Prime is a bit of a crapshoot, with a few good things and a whole lot of shit to pick through. It’s sort of like Mystery Science Theater.
We love Mystery Science Theater… the ones with Mike especially, but the older ones with Joel have some gems.
Maggie – I have not had cable for 10 years. Between free “out of the air” tv and internet/amazon, we are happy as a clam and never run out of shows to watch including MST.
Lots of folks up late tonight, even old Stucky. 🙂
These days I’ve reached pretty much 99% normal folk user generated content on youtube/video services and I still can’t watch everything I’ve queued up. Not even high production value documentaries on the free documentary sites are on the list because they are almost always out of date by the time they finally get filmed, edited, and released. The Red Pill was probably the last one I spent any money on and that wasn’t because I expected to learn anything new, but wanted to see how the subject matter was handled.
The movie/tv machine has reached almost $0 sucked from me and I’m being generous if they’ve gotten 1% of my viewing attention the past two years. I’m hoping the next year it’ll be a true $0. Can’t get to true 0% because visiting family means required exposure even if reading in the same room as everyone else watching.
Yup.
So, I’m at the library working on a new pictorial essay I’ll be submitting on Monday. I take a break to see what’s playing at the movies. Hey, a new Thor movie! Let’s see it!
It starts at 7:15. So, I says,, let’s go home and eat the leftover pumpkin & meatball soup, take a small nap (it was 5PM), and well be all juiced up to see two movies …. the Justice League movie was starting just as Thor ended. We always sneak in for a two-fer.
Well ….. that nap lasted Eight fucken hours. Now I’m wide awake at 2:30AM. Fucks up my whole day. I’ve already made flowerless biscuits for her breakfast, swept the kitchen, and choked the chicken. I’m running out of shit to do.
What’s in the flourless biscuits Stuck? After choking the chicken, I’m afraid to ask. 🙂
By “flourless”I mean wheat flour. Gluten free, baby! I am a rabid anti-flourite. Which is like anti-Semite, but fewer pictures.
Pretty much everything that’s in a regyoulah biscuit, except the flour is a blend of coconut and almond flours.
Building your own DVR is actually pretty simple. An older PC with current technology TV tuner, Winders 7 and a quality video card is all you need.
Antenna feeds the tuner, video card HDMI connected to the TV, and Winders 7 with free Media Center extensions provides a fully functional menu interface. Most modern tv tuner cards are dual and allows watching one tuner while recording on the other.
My TV costs are zero, 9 bucks for Netflix
I cut the cord 10 years ago