Cutting the cord

This last month we ditched our satellite dish. So no cable, no satellite. I don't really miss it at all.

Granted I do miss my Expedition Unknowns and watching the guys from American Pickers find hidden gems in junk. But when we figured out how much we were paying for so few shows, the cord got snipped.

I did go thru a week of withdrawal tho, I so miss my Mark Peterson in the mornings, along with the rest of the gang on Good Morning Northwest on KXLY. But I follow them on Twitter and Facebook, watch when they live stream in the morning (a bit more on that in a minute) when they have one and catch a lot of the stories they broadcast on their website later. Same with the other Spokane news stations.

So instead we have a Roku that lets us stream Acorn TV, Netflix and Amazon. Also can watch YouTube and listen to Pandora. There are a ton of free channels, you do get commercials (and in some cases the same 3 commercials, over and over and over and over and over.....) but we've found some gems on a couple of the black and white channels where they run big blocks of old commercials from the 50s and 60s. They are great.

Between the 3 we are watching a lot of shows. Granted there are some we can't get right now (come on Netflix, put Babylon 5 back on streaming!), but with so much to watch we are patient. If there is a movie we simply have to see that isn't free on Netflix or Amazon I can usually get the DVD thru the library and watch it that way. Plus we have a few hundred DVDs we burned of movies and shows that we need to catalog and get into some order so we can find it (for which I have an idea, just need binders and DVD sheet pockets).

We also ditched Sprint and switched to AT&T. Hubby spent a week talking with all the providers and got us a decent deal from AT&T that included new phones. Now granted, I was not happy with giving up my Samsung Galaxy S5, it has been a wonderful phone, but we couldn't transfer it, so I now have a shiny new Samsung Galaxy S7 that has been pretty nice so far. Camera is not as big as my old one (12MP over the 16MP), but the photos look great and the photo editing software that comes with it is nice. So I can live with it.

But the really cool thing is I can broadcast stuff on my phone onto the TV via the Roku. So when I find videos and what not I want to watch, I can do that. My desktop computer has no sound at the moment (sound components puked), so I just beam what I want to watch to the TV and I get to see it on the big screen with 5.1 sound :D Which is really nice when I watch the live stream stuff from my morning news show.



Comments