I've decided that in the past, I was spending way too much on TV service for how little I actually watched it. The PVR helped, but it also revealed to me how focused my TV watching is. I don't miss channel surfing, and I rarely watched live TV, so why am I still chained to 250 some channels for too much a month?

So for the month of October, I am going to attempt to still watch what I want, in a legal way, and see how it goes. I have a Mac Mini hooked to the HDTV, and now have a multipass subscription to The Daily Show. I bought The Office DVDs yesterday, and will look at buying the shows I want to watch in October off the iTunes store.

My first impressions are going to be of The Daily Show files off iTunes. One episode ended up being 250 megs, and is now 640x480. Quality wise, it looked better then my old method of recording it on the ReplayTV. The nice thing with the iTunes file is that it has no commercials in it, so much like the ReplayTV, I'm not touching the remote at all during playback. With the multipass subscription, the next 15 episodes will auto download to the machine when they are released, so all I have to do is grab the remote to activate Front Row, and select the show. From what I remember of The Daily Show release cycle, 16 shows ends up being about how many they do in a month, so this is going to cost me $10 a month to see.

Thus far one downside appears to be that not all the shows I want to watch are available on the iTunes store immediately. For example, the episodes of Mythbusters appear to be quite old, probably mirroring the first season DVD releases instead of having the newer shows. I've written the Discovery Channel to see if they have plans to change this anytime soon.

Drakino,

Please keep us posted on how this experiment works out. I'd love to do this also, but I think it would be difficult based on this:

On HBO:
Curb Your Enthusiasm
specials like the recent Dane Cook standup, some movies, and others

Survivor (guilty pleasure)
Lost (in HD, this show is THE REASON for having a big TV)
24 (just "met" Kiefer tonight - see http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonbauer/257000061/
The Office
Reno 911
The Daily Show (haven't missed one episode in 4 years or so now)
Saturday Night Live (Dane Cook is hosting tonight, btw)
Prison Break - not fantastic, but still fun to watch (and in HD)
Superbikes (Speed Channel)
All of the MotoGP races (usually on Speed Channel too)
Check Please Bay Area (on PBS)

Maybe a few others that I can't think of.

So I REALLY dig TV - but I really don't think I could get a lot of this if I ditched my DirecTV.

$75 a month is ridiculous, imo, but when you really think about the AMOUNT of entertainment you get for that, it's probably a pretty good deal.

I'm still interested in hearing about your experience...

- Thanx
- Jon

Wow, good timing. I'm doing exactly the same thing. At the end of Oct. I'm canceling DirecTV, and all TV will either be OTA digital or downloaded or Netflixed. I might have to find an old series 2 Tivo for the OTA stuff... but haven't started researching the free guide data possibility. Ultimately, I want to have a Mac Mini with a TV tuner and a big ass NAT drive that will do it all. But a new Macbook Pro will have to come first so I can rid myself of PCs all together (praying Maya will run decently on a boot camp setup when the core 2 duo version is released). I could just use my old shuttle as a Windows Media PC... just don't want the headaches... there are ALWAYS headaches with Win PCs.

I'm half hoping the whole thing will just make me watch less TV overall... and maybe get more art done. But damn... I can't miss Lost or Sunny in Philly or The Office..

There was a thread (slashdot?) on how the iTunes 640x480 files are merely poorly upsampled copies of the cheaper 320x200 files from there.. Apparently upsampling yourself in quicktime may produce better quality.

Cheers

Dane Cook? Really? His stand up seems pretty lame to me. I'll admit that I did laugh once during his opening monologue/stand-up routine (at the "you can drive through ghosts" line), but I found it otherwise totally unfunny. He kinda reminds me of Kenny Bania from Seinfeld.

Unfortunately, I had to leave shortly after the monologue, but I did see him host last season. As much as I find his stand-up lame, he did a good job on the show (other than the monologue).

Yeah, the monologue was pretty weak (though the youTube bit was good), but I gotta admit I've laughed my ass off at his other stand-up specials. His CD's are good too but he's a pretty visual comic, so they play way better on a screen.

i have been doing this for over a year now. I download all my comercial free tv from newsgroups. [blanked].com is your friend.

So far, it is looking like this might be the right direction for me. I don't really feel I'm missing much by not having 5000 unwatched channels, and I'm still seeing most of the shows I used to watch. The Daily Show is normally posted around midnight, so I am a day behind watching it. But it has been nice to just come home, grab the tiny mac remote and pull up the show. The best part is that I can either watch the show on my HDTV, or go watch it in my bedroom where I hooked up an older PC to my 27 inch monitor there.

My only big complaint so far is the varying prices on the shows off the store. Some are always $2 an episode no matter what, while others offer season passes for cheaper. I have been buying the episodes of Heroes as they come out, it looks like it is the only show in this fall lineup that I will try to catch close to release. Lost is still on my plate to buy on DVD one day and watch. Oh, and Battlestar Galactica, I'm going to be watching it at the Alamo every other week. They bought a PVR, and will be running the last episode then the new episode every week. So by going every two weeks I'll see that show in two hour chunks.

Quality wise, yes the files off the iTunes store aren't HD quality, but it's good enough for me. If Voom was still around I'd probably care more about HD, but really I watch TV shows for the content and story, not the ability to read some calendar on the wall in the background of shows. Being that I already have the Mini, I have a hard time justifying the cost necessary for me to go to HD with PVR capabilities with some other box like a Tivo Series 3. Besides, I'd then worry if the box is even going to let me record shows thanks to DRM in it.

I do wish the Front Row interface for TV shows worked the same way it does for video podcasts though. When a new episode of DL.TV is downloaded, it is marked with a blue dot in the interface till I watch it. TV shows just appear at the bottom of the list, and with "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart - 10/13/06" as the title, I only get most of the portion without the date. Something tells me though after seeing the iTV interface this will be cleaned up in the future.

Thanks for the update. I'm going to pull the plug in a few weeks!

I'm sorry, I guess I forgot. Why are you not doing anything OTA?

Seriously. Even where I live in the middle of nowhere (about 43 mi. from the closest broadcasting city), I can get two beautiful quality OTA HD channels on my TV with a standard antenna. With a long-range directional antenna I could get several more (all the networks + PBS). Seems like it'd be a cheap option to invest a few bucks in a decent antenna and get all the networks in HD.

Go to Antennaweb.org to find out what's available from your house (you don't have to fill out the whole form...just your address.)

I guess I can see that. I'd probably just build myself a basic Myth box in that case, but I'm interested in how your plan works out. I could get away from cable and satellite for the most part, but I couldn't only go through iTunes, as it would get very expensive. There's also the fact that I despise iTunes

After a month, I have spent $36.70 on iTunes shows. They are:
Multipass to The Daily Show (16 episodes, still running)
Multipass to The Colbert Report (16 episodes, still running)
One episode of The Cobert Report before I got the multipass
Heroes episodes 1-5
South Park WoW episode

I also bought The Office season 1 and 2 on DVD, but have not watched them yet, costing me $69.26.

I've also been attending the showings of Battlestar Galactica at the Alamo Drafthouse. They are free to get in to.

Beyond that, I've watched a lot of video netcasts, including DL.TV, Command N, Ctrl-Alt-Chicken, Diggnation, and Cranky Geeks. All of them in the same Front Row interface that I use for the iTunes shows.

Right now the shows I miss are Smallville, Mythbusters, and just general information shows like Discovery tends to air. I did dig out the Voom box, but have yet to hook up my ReplayTV again. The local PBS station does broadcast in HD, so I've caught an episode of Nova that way.

For now, I think I'm comfortable with the arrangement I have. I'll probably look into an HD tuner PVR solution for the Mac Mini to record over the air shows, instead of investing in equipment with DirecTV or Dish Network. I may look at the price of the packages Time Warner has, but odds are the channels I want will be all over the place, resulting in an $70 bill. While I did spend more then that this month, the Office DVDs and the multipasses will carry me into November.

The tuner I am considering is this one from Elgato. I saw it at Fry's, so I may grab it on my next trip to see how it works. Looks like a good fit with the Mac Mini, since the software it comes with also works with the Apple remote.

Wow, you are doing everything I'm planning to do a month or so ahead of me! I've been eyeing that tuner and a mac mini for a while, but I just plunked down the cash for a MBP Core 2 Duo so It's gonna have to wait a bit.

ALL RIGHT! Down with Timewarner!! I was just thinking about doing this too. I am putting together a mythtv box and upgrading my netflix and itunes allowance to offset. We will see if I can ween myself and the wife off the cable. Please keep us posted on your progress.

What are you going to use to get on the internet ?

Move to mountain view like me and use google wifi

(currently with an allegedly 10dBi antenna getting a -83dB signal from one google AP - I am in theory in a no-coverage area... Etherdesigns Cantenna on the way...)

Bit of a blast from the past at 500k-1mbitish (I was on 10mbit cable in the UK), but definitely usable. DSL to this building seems to max out at 1.5mbit, which is definitely not worth $60 - ie, what I paid for 10m in the UK.

Hugo

I'm paying $15/month for 3mbps ATT/Yahoo DSL... but then you have to have a land line account already.

I apologize for continuing the tangent, but does anyone have any experience with FIOS? I can get it in my area and I'm wondering what people think of it. I have Cox Cable right now, and they continue to live up to their name in every way. Our internet connection slows down to a screeching halt at least every other day, the modem then needs to be power cycled, and it still isn't very fast (not as fast as it used to be). We've gone through two modems in the past six months. They've come out to the house twice. I just want to get rid of the company.

The one upside to having Cox Cable? It makes it so much better to shout "COX!" when your internet goes down.