Zero TV

[OrsunVZ]

Does anyone know if a xbox gold subscription can be used on 2 boxes in the same house at the same Time?

This is a very good question... I would like to know as well.

[OrsunVZ]

Come to think of it, this is a really important question, because rather than buy a Roku or something, I could just use my Xbox as planned, and then pick up the XboxONE or 720 or whatever the eff they're calling it these days later this year.

[Slamz]

Even if the answer is "no", a second X-Box gold account is what, $25/year?

[Vanraw]

Searching around, it looks like you can't log in on both at the same Time.

[OrsunVZ]

2 days into zero cable, and I think we're going to be just fine. Morning routine getting my son ready for school has us missing Little Einsteins, but he was easily distracted by some old episode of Spider man and his amazing friends and the How to Train Your Dragon series, both of which he chose through the LIVE interface where you can choose by selecting the picture of the main character if you choose.

Got my 50 Mbps service through comcast up and running, and all major devices fully networked and hard wired in. Wi Fi set up for the hand held stuff.

The only thing I'm missing through LIVE is news, where I can only get ABC, so it's sort of limited. My PC on the other hand has access to everything else, but that is powering a different TV along with my gaming monitors.

My wife, still consumed with unpacking hasn't missed anything yet, but that will be the true test. Time will tell, but so far I'm not missing anything, and as we've said already, hopefully HBO.GO will be accessible without a cable subscription in time for the next season of 'Thrones.

[Slamz]

Don't forget about Amazon (and, if you must, iTunes). You can buy a whole season of a TV show and still come out with a lower bill for that month than your cable bill would have been.

[strife]

Dude, just get a over the air TV antenna... You'll be able to get a lot of local broadcast in HD that way... just spend a little bit of money and set it up correctly(and pointed the correct direction) and you're good to go.

[OrsunVZ]

Yeah that was going to be my next question: Who uses HD antennas, and what has your experience been? You say set it up correctly, what does that entail?
So far everything I've done falls into the "hey if yer not a complete moron, you could figure this stuff out while getting simultaneously wedgied and boob slapped." Which is to say, as simple as a pimple.

[strife]

Yeah that was going to be my next question: Who uses HD antennas, and what has your experience been? You say set it up correctly, what does that entail?
So far everything I've done falls into the "hey if yer not a complete moron, you could figure this stuff out while getting simultaneously wedgied and boob slapped." Which is to say, as simple as a pimple.

I don't have one(as I can't convince my wife that she doesn't need cable TV), but my good buddy at work does and he says he gets about 20-30 channels and he's about 30 minutes north of Houston, a lot of them in HD over the air. A lot of it depends on where you're at and how close to a big city you are. In Houston, you can supposedly get 50-80 channels.

All the install really entails is physically mounting the antenna, which I'm pretty sure you can do, running some cabling, which if your house is already set up with cable would mostly mean just hooking it up to the main in to your house that the cable company would have used) and pointing the antenna it in the right direction. You can get antennas that install either on your roof/side of house or in the attic and they aren't really that expensive... Do the research on what type you want and you'll find one... if you don't mind having a huge antenna on the roof, they are going to get you the best reception... but from talking to my buddy(who I trust with anything concerning TV/Electronics), you can get damn good quality TV from an attic antenna.

Go here and put in your address and it will tell you what stations you can get and their signal strength. It will also tell you the direction of the channels so you know which way to point the antenna. There are some antennas that are motorized that you can move by using a control panel, but IMO that's overkill...

http://www.tvfool.com/index.php?option=c...&Itemid=29

As an example, I live about 20 minutes north east of houston and I show to get 22 channels in strong signal strength and about 45 total.

[Skelas]

Just an FYI, over the air HD is the highest quality HD you can receive since it's not limited by any bandwidth. You can just put rabbit ears on your TV and get close stuff, or you can drop 2-300 bucks and get a professionally installed antenna.

[Snowreap]

as far as I can tell, an "HD" antenna is exactly the same as the old TV antennas. the frequencies used for broadcasts are the same, after all, and that's the determining factor in antenna design (along with directional sensitivity and, so I understand, signal polarization).

what's different is the move away from analog encoding to digital encoding, and for that you need a digital (aka "HD") receiver.

if you live somewhere where rabbit ears would have been sufficient for analog broadcasts, then rabbit ears should work fine for digital. if you live somewhere where you needed an 8-foot by 10-foot antenna at the top of a 15-foot pole, you'll probably still need it.

-ken

[Grieve]

Dish just made a deal with Disney that lets them stream ABC channels live over the internet. That's pretty big - no one else has been able to do that. Hopefully it will open the floodgates for everyone now.

It's not perfect, though. Disney forced them to keep the bundling concept, so you can't just get ABC or The Disney Channel. You have to get ABC and Disney and ESPN (and other Disney channels) all together. That's less appealing to me, since we never watch ESPN. It's also going to be $20-30 for the package, which is way too much. But, once it gets going and there is competition from other providers, that should go down.

Then again, we're doing fine with Hulu and Netflix (and OTA on one TV upstairs for live stuff like the Oscars). So this is less interesting that it would have been a year ago.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-04...cable.html

[Vanraw]

Although I hadn't done it for years, I went back to torrents to get my Game of Thrones fix. But...I've had two “Notice of Claim of Copyright Infringement” e-mails from Comcast, listing exactly what I downloaded and when. So I’ve had to stop that, or risk getting my service cut off (or worse). This is probably the biggest downside for me.

You can go here (or others) https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ and get a VPN service. Comcast cant see what is inside a tunnel. PIA also has a proxy service if you want to do torrents, so that the torren6s are proxies from servers all over the place. They do not log connections so there is nothing to be subpoenaed.

I use this cause I can stream TV channels from other countries. Like shows running on syfy that are a year behind, and are caught up in Canada. Just choose a Canadian VPN and you IP is from Canada and they don't restrict you based on region. You can VPN into the uk and stream all them soap operas your missing or get DR Who before it plays here.

Most torrents have the ability to define a proxy now as well. so you can do a sock 5 and be pretty safe.

Also this site, http://checkmytorrentip.com/ is kinda cool. You down load a torrent from them and it shows you your browser IP and the IP the torrent is down loading to. So it checks to assure you can not be tracked.

http://checkmytorrentip.com/

[Uncle Shags]

Somehow I missed this post. No cable for years.

I use netflix and amazon, but for the stuff I can't get there (HBO) I use project free tv.

http://www.free-tv-video-online.me/

I use adblockerplus to avoid the popups. And just close the register window. Other than that, it's pretty decent. I can normally get HBO shows the same night they are broadcasted.

[Jakensama]

Although I hadn't done it for years, I went back to torrents to get my Game of Thrones fix. But...I've had two “Notice of Claim of Copyright Infringement” e-mails from Comcast, listing exactly what I downloaded and when. So I’ve had to stop that, or risk getting my service cut off (or worse). This is probably the biggest downside for me.

You can go here (or others) https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ and get a VPN service. Comcast cant see what is inside a tunnel. PIA also has a proxy service if you want to do torrents, so that the torren6s are proxies from servers all over the place. They do not log connections so there is nothing to be subpoenaed.

I use this cause I can stream TV channels from other countries. Like shows running on syfy that are a year behind, and are caught up in Canada. Just choose a Canadian VPN and you IP is from Canada and they don't restrict you based on region. You can VPN into the uk and stream all them soap operas your missing or get DR Who before it plays here.

Most torrents have the ability to define a proxy now as well. so you can do a sock 5 and be pretty safe.

Also this site, http://checkmytorrentip.com/ is kinda cool. You down load a torrent from them and it shows you your browser IP and the IP the torrent is down loading to. So it checks to assure you can not be tracked.

http://checkmytorrentip.com/

You can get a seedbox too - they are generally quick and then you just ftp the files from their server and theres no record of you ever sharing a damn thing.

[Grieve]

I've hooked into my brother-in-law's HBO Go account, so luckily I should have no issues getting my Game Of Thrones fix. I'm buying Walking Dead via iTunes.

I'm also buying all my movies through iTunes, and giving up on the cinema (except for the occasional kid movie). iTunes is great for movies these days - every week that have a big selection of movies you can buy for (effectively) $7.99 in HD, including pretty recent ones.