I'm not sure about all the telephone alternatives but hulu and netflix are very simple to work with... you set up a queue with both of them for your favorite tv shows or movies and they take care of the rest complete with head's up emails all the time... those are the two services that I currently have that I'm entirely happy with... my galpal has wasted days, not hours, but days, trying to get her bill straightened out with Verizon, they must be on a commission structure that encourages mistakes in Verizon's favor because they tell her it's all sorted out and the next bill has some huge amount on it.. she's been doing this for months... I listened to her story and it was very easy to decide to not do business with any phone company, if one is that messed up the rest can get away with a lot too, forget it, I have a prepaid ten cents a minute cell phone and will not move off that until I find something better... I'm like that, I have bought only one new car in my life.. the dealer was so shitty about after the sale care that I never bought a new car after that ever, and I've had a dozen cars.. then I got such shitty treatment at a dealer that my wife bought a used car from that I won't go on a dealer's lot... if it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck and it smells like shit, it's shit, I'm not going near it...
Many are dropping cable and satellite for broadcast and not just to save money. If the program is broadcast in HDTV rather than just digital, they say the picture quality surpasses any of cable or so-called digital satellite. Just before the switch to digital, I spent many enthusiastic hours researching for a new TV. I had to get the old analog TV running for the switch, and totally lost interest in a new TV once the switch was made. Huge improvement in picture quality. DTV signal is multiples better than analog. No more picture with "snow" and that irritating ghosting or double picture. Problem with DTV signal is that you might need a better antenna than the one you used before to get analog. I live between 30 and 70 miles from broadcast towers so the old outdoor omnidirectional antenna could only pull in 3 of the new digital out of the 11 old analog stations. So I installed a directional antenna, rotator and signal preamplifier and get about 16 stations. It cost about $200 to achieve a signal and should last 15 years. Seems like the cable company said it would cost me 7 or 10K to string up 2 miles of cable to my place. The main thing is having a large selection of local news and weather along with Netflix.
2 miles of cable to your place? I assume you live comfortably out of the rat race. Care to share any particulars for we concrete-canyon dwellers?
Agree. Saw a show on Europeans' impressions of America. 1)Fast food joints have huge food portions 2)you Americans suffer through lots of TV commercials. U.S. commercial TV is a wasteland.
The ONLY commercial worth watching! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhlWddAXSRA Gotta love the Gunny! (And that's Drill Instructor, not Drill Sergeant! The Gunny is a former US Marine. Ooh rah!)
You don't want to live here, but it's home. My hometown's population is hard to determine as they count the whole township. The town has maybe a few dozen houses, doesn't have a traffic light, we don't have a bank anymore, no grade school anymore, school is 12 miles away and an hour each way on the school bus (that was fun), no "grocery" store anymore (it only had staples like beer and cigs), just a post office, a tavern, and surprisingly a hardware and health food store. We got indoor plumbing!, and usually electricity unless tree branches knock down lines, then you can be without power for days, but usually just several hours. I have to drive 12 miles to a grocery store of any substance. A real grocery store is out of driving range. No broadband internet! Just dial-up, I'm looking into WISP though. The signal might reach, shall see. There's the good: few neighbors other than relatives, peace and quiet other than crickets, frogs, sandhill crane, geese, deer, raccoons that once and no longer can get into the fireplace chimney to raise a litter, the dozen cars that drive by daily on my gravel road. No noise pollution, no light pollution as you can see the Milky Way. Crime is zero 'cause the criminals know they will get shot. We have to protect ourselves and each other because the sheriff is 20 miles away. The only thing I want from the concrete jungle is broadband, WISP might be possible-don't want satellite, and them thar produce markets where there's a huge selection of fruit and veggies that you can't even get here.
Funny nobody mentioned torrents yet. An antenna gets the basic TV channels, the rest you get from the internet. End of story.... I mean if you really want to be cheap...
The cable ends about 1000 feet from our house. Six years ago they wanted $19 per foot to run it out. I said no and haven't been sorry.
Not too shabby out there...I've been through enough small town/rural areas a couple of hours from me where at times I wouldn't mind a place. Sure there may not be much roads in spots and "civilization" is a bit of a drive (stores, etc.), but if you can get the open spots needed enough for the cables to run, and get on at least partly solar (or have some good generators handy for those rough power outages), plus get a reasonable Internet connection, then things would be just fine... and the homes are usually cheaper!