Posted on 04/24/2016 5:00:48 PM PDT by Macoozie
ISPs, who once fed us lines about excessive bandwidth usage and network congestion in order to upsell people on higher-tier “business class” Internet packages, are now essentially using the same tactics to punish cord-cutters, many of which were likely former cable subscribers.
(Excerpt) Read more at techspot.com ...
At some point a company will be founded that rents you a satellite up-link dish and you’ll become your own internet provider.
I don’t imagine that day is far off and may have already arrived
I use Earthlink as my ISP. They in turn use Time Warner cable. I am paying $29.95 a month (total) for internet only for 6 months. It goes up to $41.95 after that. They told me the speed would be 25mbs but it is 58mbs. I ain’t calling them to correct it.
I use the MOHU OTA antenna (flat 1ft square) and I have a ROKU box and the Netflix app. I also have Amazon Prime app installed which I use as I buy most things thru them. They throw in movies and tv shows. I also have Sling tv https://www.sling.com for $20/month.
I also have bought movies and tv shows and use the following programs below to convert them so I can copy them to a external hard drive plugged into the tv. I mainly use the program PLEX TV https://plex.tv on my computer and their app for the ROKU box where I have a folder with all my video and photos which somehow communicates with the tv:
Freemake Video Converter - FREE
http://www.freemake.com/free_video_converter
Acrok Video Converter (to convert to mp4) $35
http://www.acrok.com/video-converter
DVDFab 9 Ripper - (to strip the encryption off the dvds as you copy to your pc) $49
http://www.dvdfab.cn/dvd-ripper/how-to-convert-dvd-to-mp4-with-dvd-to-mp4-ripper.htm
3 networks?? Where do you live?
I am in Phoenix, been nothing but air tv for a few years now and we get nearly 70 channels when we do a channel search with my 20 year old analog antenna that has been up in my attic since we bought the house. Granted a large percentage of those channels are Spanish language channels, but we watch way more than 3 networks.
BTW, if you have an xbox or even if not, you can download Kodi (the xbox media center program) for your PC and you can watch pretty much any channel that exists though your computer.
I have a co-worker who watches her Netflix shows all day while munching on her snacks. This between calls at our Help Desk. She must use a lot of bandwidth. We had a guy who streamed music thru the office wifi and our Datacom dept noticed. He had to stop.
You can go online to Netflix and set the speed delivered to your Netflix accounts to limit your data usage. A average movie is around 350 Meg on the low bandwidth setting. Amazon prime can burn a couple of gigs per movie as it will deliver as fast as it can for the best picture possible.
4g LTE can stream a lot of data, if you are hot spotting your phone on AT&T, Netflix is a real wallet saver.
Always read the small print
I’ve been running a series of experiments designed to restore access to all of the services our ISP (Cox) once delivered via cable and phone land lines. First to go: the phone service, now provided by an Ooma Telo VOIP box for one-tenth the monthly expense. Next to go were the DVRs, replaced with Channel Master boxes and 1T hard drives for time-shifting broadcast TV programs. Then the modem rental was cut by buying my own box. And finally, the cable service was cut and replaced with indoor aerials and a variety of set-top boxes.
The best picture quality: Roku 3 and 4. Tried Google Chrome, android box, and XBox for more channel variety via wi-fi. Amazing array of content on the android, but the picture stinks. Tried Sling-TV on the Channel Master and found the picture to be marginal. The final, best solution: an Amazon Fire Stick and a subscription to Sony’s Playstation Vue. It costs ten bucks more a month for their basic package than Sling-TV. But it delivers better pictures and access to Fox News live streaming, plus 70 other HD channels.
The downside: I’ve had to upgrade to Cox’ Ultimate internet package. Between just my wife and I, we’re using over 100G per day.
But our overall cost for all of these services is still less than half what it had been. All of our antennas’ TV pictures are at least as good as cable delivered. Land line phone calls are a lot clearer. And our download speeds have trebled, since I bought my own modem and upgraded the router.
The only route I haven’t tried yet: using a mini-PC as a set-top box. That may be next if I get too annoyed with the android unit’s crappy picture quality. It’s also an alternative to using the Amazon Fire Stick and Playstation Vue, since Fox News and most other cable channels are available on the web for live streaming. But since I believe these signals are bootlegged, I think I’ll stick with Playstation for now. Guess I’ve gone goody two shoes in my dotage...
But they make their money off cable. Without cable most of them would be gone.
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