I am on a bit of a personal quest to reduce monthly bills where possible. I realized that between two mobile phones, Vonage, broadband internet via Comcast, and television via Comcast and DISH network we were spending a lot on communications.
At first I went to reduce redundancy; but my partner and I each like having our own mobile phone, and the Vonage is very useful for keeping daytime minutes on the mobiles down when we are working from home and on long-running conference calls. We were able to reduce Vonage to minimal bill by dropping the all-you-can-talk plan and going with metered minutes that we rarely exceed.
The second redundancy is getting TV from both DISH and Comcast. Our Comcast is the cheapest cable plan we can get because it gets us a discount on our broadband bill and gets us News8 (all local news all the time); it’s an analog cable plan that only costs us $19/month and gives us $15 off our broadband internet bill. So for $4 we get News8 and the same channels (mostly) we get from DISH.
With DISH we get those channels through our old DishPVR so we can time shift our shows and dodge commercials. Once you use a PVR or DVR (some simply call it a Tivo even when it’s not Tivo branded) you will never want to go back to live feeds off the air. They are that useful. So DISH has us because we want the DVR features only at this point.
We also have an AppleTV and we have rented a movie from iTunes occasionally, but they are rather expensive. I would not even consider renting Pay-Per-View from Comcast or DISH because the prices are… well, insultingly high. So we have Netflix, which is a pretty good deal. I use and recommend the AppleTV for taking internet content and putting it on our big screen TV.
The AppleTV just became vastly more useful for us because of some free software we added to it. In fact, the new software on the AppleTV (or a Ubuntu, Mac OS, or Windows media server) is so amazing we may not need DISH or Cable at all going forward.
The new software is Boxee used in conjunction with Hulu. Boxee is both a web site and free software you download to your computer or set top box. Hulu is a website. Both are free, and thrive on commercial advertising. Both use feeds of television content from nearly all the networks; the feeds have commercials built into them.
With Boxee on my laptop, I can watch all my favorite TV shows on demand, for free, in high definition when it’s available. With Boxee on my AppleTV I can watch those same shows on the big screen TV.
Imagine having a library of nearly every TV show ever made, available on demand to you after a few keyboard strokes or mouse clicks. Hawaii Five-O is just as readily available as last night’s episode of Fringe or Battlestar Galactica. Miss an episode? It’s trivial to watch one from last week, or last year. Nostalgic for that old episode of Babylon5 you like to watch over and over? Pull it up and watch it.
Boxee and Hula make it possible for me to consider ditching both DISH and Comcast cable (though I’d need to keep my broadband internet access).
There are still small issues to work through:
- pause and resume playing your show is not always reliable
- rewinding or fast forwarding through the show is not always reliable
- occasionally the stream pauses for a minute
- the embedded commercials are really LOUD on the WB channel/network feeds, and you cannot skip them like on a DVR
- AppleTV does not allow output to standard definition TVs (this is a pain)
- AppleTV is limited to 720p or 1080i HD output (this is no big deal today, but a year from now will be important)
- I could not find “Relativity” shows on any network Boxee can search
Overall I am very impressed though.
Boxee is working towards putting their software on other set top boxes soon, so AppleTV will not be the only hardware it works on…
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