Wednesday, April 21, 2010

My No Cable Experiement

When I got my own place, I vowed myself to never get cable.   I noticed I was much more productive without it.  I did a lot more reading and surfing the internet.  I was outside exercising more and discovering new things.  I spent way more time practicing my hobbies like photography and soccer.  I even did a very little bit of coding on the side.  Not having television forced me to spend my time more actively  I no longer had a reason to sit down and just veg out.  It also saved me some money. 


As I spent more time surfing the web, I discovered that I could watch most of my favorite television shows online.  Thanks to sites like Hulu, Youtube, CBS, and ABC I had access to my favorite shows.  Hulu, when it first came out, was the greatest thing since sliced bread to me. Not only could I watch my shows whenever I wanted to, with limited commercials, but I could go back and watch previous seasons.  More recently Hulu has begun to offer just about every show I watch plus some sports highlights.  It's great.

Once I discovered I could watch stuff online, I looked for ways to stream this to my television.  I purchased a Slingmedia SlingCatcher, and when I finally became available, 25mbps FIOS connection.  The SlingCatcher streams pretty much all flash based web video to your tv.  It works pretty well, I don't have too many complaints about it.  For my movie watching I use Orb to stream stuff to my Xbox360 and finally to my television. 


For sports I discovered Espn360.com, soon to be Espn3.com.  Espn360 gives you access to a lot of the sports Espn shows.  In addition to NBA, MLB, and a few college sports, Espn360 gives you access to European soccer leagues.  This was a big bonus to me, since if I had cable I would purchase the extra soccer channels.  Espn360 is the closest thing I found to being able to watch live sports on the internet for free. 

Here's the downer.  I think I watch more TV now than when I did have access to cable.  On Hulu alone I went from watching 3 Shows Regularly (House, 24, Grey's Anatomy) to watching 10 Shows.  With that said there are shows like Glee or Modern Family that weren't on when I first started using Hulu.  So now instead of browsing the television for interesting things to watch, I browse the internet and Hulu.  I watch old episodes and search for new things of random interest.  It feels different, but I'm doing the same thing as I was doing with cable.

In essence the internet only moved this problem to a new medium.  I am saving money by not having cable though, so that could be a plus.

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