Cancelling Cable

After a lot of talking with Sean, we finally cancelled our cable television service three weeks ago.  The largest motivating factor was price: I was paying about $120 a month for television service, plus $60 for my cable internet service.  In the past month, I think we’ve watched 5 hours of programming, and most of that has been network HDTV that we receive for free over the air (we had to buy an HDTV antenna since Charter Cable seems unwilling/unable to provide us with static free local HDTV channels).

The original plan was to buy an Apple TV and stream video from our aging G4 server to it.  I bought an Apple TV and sorta liked it for a couple of days.  The interface was undeniably cool, and I loved having the ability to stream audio and video podcasts on a whim.  But when it came to video playback, it didn’t make a good impression.  Most of my media is stand definition Xvid encoded files, and I do have a fair amount of 720p Matroska content.  I was able to pretty easily install additional codecs on the Apple TV, but it just didn’t seem to have enough raw power to play a 720p Matroska file.  Sure, I could transcode the file to a 720p h.264 file, but with our media server only being a lowly G4 Mac Mini that would take literally days for a single hour of television content.  

In the end, I found it cheaper to just hook my MacBook Air up to our television and stream content from our Mac Mini.  It’s certainly not as elegant or simple as having the Apple TV always standing by to play content, and I really miss the interface and convenience of a dedicated appliance.  However, the majority of my media content is not coming from iTunes, so the Apple TV really did have a large hill to climb to serve my needs.  I’ve read it only has a 1 ghz Pentium M chip powering it: if a Core Duo version was released I’d snap it up in a minute.

This turned into a rant about the Apple TV, but the actually living without cable part is going well.  I really haven’t noticed that it’s gone: Sean and I still have access to all of our important shows (eg: Project Runway).  The only time I really missed having cable was earlier today when I was home sick with Evie: there’s not a whole lot of channel flipping you can do at 4 in the afternoon with just network television.