Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Cutting the cable guy

Even those of us not in the sticks hate you, OTA sucks up here, very limited channel selection let alone HD.

I haven't had cable or satellite for a couple years now. Finally broke down and got some "rabbit ears" last year. HD reception is not bad at all. I do miss watching baseball, though.

My favorite part is that it takes me about a minute to channel surf. If nothing good is playing on one of the five channels I get (assuming I don't move the antenna around) I look for something else to do.

Hey don't hate me too much guys, I neglected to mention I only get 10 channels. I also have to confess I was never much of a TV person anyway - I DESPISE commercials. So these days I just wait for shows to come out on DVD; if Netflix streaming has it, even better.

Zarak, we're pretty damn close, I'm over in Audubon. You can use this site to guage your reception: http://www.antennaweb.org. It was very accurate when I used it back when. I tried the MLB package before I realized they blacked out the local games. And that Slingbox idea has a lot of merit - it works as an internet connection right? I think I may have to send my brother in CA a Slingbox!

The Slingbox method works, worldwide. My coworker transferred to Switzerland for 2 years. He was complaining that he couldn't watch the Wolverines anymore. I told him that if he paid for my sports package and my increase in cable modem package, I'd let him keep a Tivo HD and Slingbox at my house. He installed a Slingcatcher on his TV in Switzerland. Worked fine.

The other day I counted my OTA channels in the SF Bay Area. I receive about 58 or so and I know w/ some antenna tweaking I could probably get about 10 to 15 more. Granted 2/3's of those are Spanish, Chinese and Korean.

I like the idea of saving the money, and actually, I kind of like the idea of geeking out on this project.

Problem is, any hybrid solution is going to be harder to use than good old DTV DVR. If I were the only user, that would probably be okay.

I dunno, maybe there is away to use MythTV, Boxee or something to tie it all together, but I just don't seem to have the energy.

Agreed. In our house, I standardized on Tivos for the wife. I put her non-OTA content on our server and the Tivo sees it on the network as a share. The only manual thing I have to do is pull the content and save it to the share. My Mac Mini manages those share folders and transcoding w/ pytivo. For her, the Tivo interface is all she has to deal w/. We have the Roku as well but it's not perfect w/ Playon and Hulu Plus isn't there yet.

Using OTA here I would get 4 channels

Anyone used the TiVo Premier interface yet? I read some pretty iffy reviews about it, so I'm a little concerned about when it comes time to upgrade.

I probably saw the same reviews. The interface is 'nice' but overall the box isn't that much faster than the previous HD boxes. From what I've gathered, the only things you get are the new search interface, iPad capability, and Hulu Plus as a promise. Don't get me started on those last 2, which don't even need a new box to support.

I struggled to decide whether my 2nd box would be a Premiere. Then I convinced a friend to sell me his old Tivo HD for $50.

Using OTA here, I might get one channel! It's not that I'm in the boonies, it's that Concord is in a valley...

Ken, I'm still using the older interface.