Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Dropping Cable/Dish/DirectTv/ETC

I am considering dropping Cable all together. I have netflix and hulu plus streaming from my PS3 but I am still missing some shows. Hulu plus does not have deals with all the networks yet so shows such as Fringe or Daily Show With john Stewart are still not there. What other options do I have? I know I can buy season passes from Apple or Amazon, but they are pretty expensive and would simply replace the cost of the cable. Can anyone tell me what the whole iTV thing is about? Any other options out there that anyone can think of?

I’m not sure if you are willing to go the torrent route but I’m sure Fringe gets uploaded but not sure about “The Daily Show.” Have you checked to see if “The Daily Show” offers a webcast of any kind. You might also check to see if anyone is uploading “The Daily Show” to YouTube, I doubt it but you never know.

I ditched TV Cable service earlier this year. Far to expensive for what it’s worth IMO. I don’t watch many current shows right now and the few I do watch are available on the sources you mentioned plus torrents to catch up with old seasons I already missed but aren’t yet available even for rental from Netflix.

Daily Show is always available on their website. Probably would take some jiggering to get it on a TV, but it can't be that hard.

Boxee will pull available episodes of The Daily Show from their website. If D-Link ever releases the Boxee Box (November?), that would make it easy. Right now I'm just using the PC software, but if I ever separate my computer and home theater system again, that Boxee Box looks like it would be pretty slick.

I think It's time for HTPC. I want the whole experience to be relatively smooth and fidget free. The torrent idea doesn't really fit into that model too well, but youtube does. Does anyone know anything aobut iTV?

While not for everyone, Believe it or Not, Usenet groups are making a big comeback. They have found new life as a place for mostly pirated movie & TV content and, of course, all the old weird discussions boards that were a bit too odd to find a place in the modern web world.

There is new software that combines bookmarking web links to automate the downloading of the once confusing, multiple file pieces and combine them together into a usable file. However, if you don't have a basic understanding of the old Usenet world, then it is tricky to explain how to set up. However, once you set it up... multiple, non-educated, users from multiple PCs, netbooks, etc. on your LAN can all bookmark their own stuff to get automatically downloaded to your library, which is kind of neat.

However, I'm not supposed to encourage such things so you didn't hear it from me and you can look up the software yourselves. As always, be careful for viruses and trojans.

Alls I know is WAIT.

the Apple TV is very limited at this time; while it can play (with some modifications) other content, it's designed to play videos bought or rented from iTunes, which limits you to (rather expensive) paid stuff.

Personally, I use a Roku box for my streaming, which does limit me to Netflix, but there's enough back catalog of stuff I want to watch that it doesn't bother me much. I don't know that I would want to ONLY use that (ie, no cable), but it works nicely for what it is.