The Goat Pen

People who grew up with the Internet do not like paying for cable TV. It’s expensive, and it’s full of terrible channels no one cares to watch. We’re already paying stiff monthly bills for broadband Internet and mobile phone service. We have a hard time justifying spending hundreds more per year for TV—especially when we can already watch most of our favorite shows on Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube, et al. That’s why I, and many of my friends, have never signed up for cable.

But there has always been one big drawback to this à la carte approach to Internet-based TV: It doesn’t include live news and sports.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Monday, Dish Network announced what is probably the first credible attempt to solve that problem. Its new, Web-based Sling TV service will offer live, streaming cable TV for $20 a month—significantly less than a standard cable subscription.

To start with, Sling TV will come with 12 major channels, including, crucially, ESPN. Here’s the full list:

ESPN
ESPN2
TNT
TBS
Food Network
HGTV
Travel Channel
Cartoon Network
Adult Swim
Disney Channel
ABC Family
CNN

That’s a much skimpier lineup than you’d get with even basic cable. But, for a lot of cord-cutters and “cord-nevers” desperate for live news and sports, it may be enough to justify the cost. Additional channel packages, like “Kids Extra” and “Sports Extra,” available for $5 apiece, are in the works. And the channel lineup will expand with time, promised Dish Network’s CEO, Joseph Clayton.

To sign up, Clayton said, you don’t need any special equipment: “All you need is a credit card and a broadband connection.” In addition to being available on your computer via the Web, the service will work with an impressive array of devices, including iOS and Android devices, Amazon Fire TV, Google Nexus Player, Roku players, and Xbox One, with more supposedly on the way.

My kids and I were talking about this last night because it is time to upgrade our television situation. We finally talked my wife into getting rid of her fancy amoire that's sole purpose was holding the television/vcr/dvd/cable box/modem over the years. It was a clunker because it was built when there were only tube televisions. The other problem was it wasn't very wide for today's large screens so the largest we can fit in there is a 42 inch. Good size 15 years ago, but small for today. We can have received permission to have a larger tv above our fireplace which is awesome because you can see it from a lot of places in our downstairs.

Anyway, we want a tv that interacts with our browser because we want to watch Netflix, Hulu, play games, etc. Since we have iphones, ipads, imacs, we were told to get Apple tv. I have no idea what that is or where to get it. I didn't see any tvs at the apple store. As you can tell I don't hang out at electronics stores so I am pretty ignorant of this. My kids claim they can set it up, but I don't trust them one bit, especially with last week's oil change incident with my 18 year old. I am sure there are a gazillion different ways to do this and everyone has their opinion which will make it harder for me to know what to do.

AppleTV is not a TV, its probably best called a console.

A lot of TVs have most of the functionality of an Apple TV built in now. Usually called "Smart TVs"

I don't know if any allow full browsing of the Internet though. Almost all just run apps to access content. There will be an ESPN app, Netflix app, maybe an Amazon app etc which you can get that content through.

I'm not all that familiar with Apple TV but I would consider a Droid Box where you can load the apps you want from the google playstore - Mozilla, Netflix, Hulu Plus, Pandora - basically it turns your TV into a 1080p smart phone without camera or dialing capabilities.

Instead of a touch screen, you buy a $16 usb wireless keyboard with a touchpad on it - and you're good to go. I don't think there is any "common" TV app that a droid doesn't have, plus you get all other stuff a box can't support.

I used to prefer Roku, but its not app oriented, its limited to channels that are built specifically for it - but with a Droid based box, you have most of that, plus all the non-TV apps.

That said, what I've found is that the only thing we really use the TV for in our house is Netflix, and if the kids want to watch anything else - the go to the smart phone or tablet. Since we've brought tablets into the house, our actual TV watching is probably down about 60%. Only the TV in the kitchen gets any use because its easier to watch it while you're doing other things - and the other TV's in the house are mostly just monitors for the Xbox or Wii.

The best thing about these boxes are they are cheap - like $80 total investment, so if you buy them and they suck - who cares.

Oh, and another thing about a droid box - I'm sure other boxes do this to some degree, but you can hang an external hard drive off of a droid box and use whatever droid app you want to access it.
For me that means I put an external 2tb hard drive off my droid box and I am in the process of ripping around 300 dvd's of classic movies I have collected and moving it all to a digital collection.

With a 2 tb drive, I can put all the movies I have - 300 or 400, and every song I have - who knows how many - about 30gb worth and have it accessible thru the droid box, use the TV as a monitor and have the stereo receiver connected for audio (HDMI input)

It will take me until summer to get it done but then with the hard drive I am going to classify them by genre like a folder for Westerns, comedy, etc

Once I get them all ripped I was going to see if anyone here wanted a copy of it - just buy a $60 hard drive and I'd copy them over for you and ship it out.


ideally I'd like to get connected with a group locally that have digital movies collected and we can trade hard drives around and grow the collection without having to up them.

and remember, I haven't even touched on XBMC which is the reason I'm convinced millenials don't think TV should be free anyways. Easily 1,000 channels - movies, porn, streaming live TV, and TV from every continent in the world - if you have the patience to learn it which isn't all that hard, and don't have to have the perfect hi-def resolution, its a game changer.

If I bought anything right now it would be a "rooted" Amazon Fire from ebay for $120 that has google play and XBMC pre-installed on it.

(ok, so its $160 here but still)
http://www.ebay.com/itm/AMAZON-FIRE-TV- ... 43cb59a344

This would be an example of a cheap droid box like I was talking about - matter of fact the one I have looks like this one but with a different brand name



apparently alot of people bundle it with the wireless keyboard I have because amazon offers them as a bundle in the link above.

I'd just get a samsung 60" 1080 P with most apps already on it/ use my wifi and surf anything else i wanted. I have apple tv-it is nice but I think most tvs offered out there today you dont have to do a whole of leg work to download everything you want. Key to your new tv is making sure live sports flows seemlessly, HBO go, amazon tv are the two apps i uses the most--amazon 99 a year and hbo go 9 a month. got netflix to for 7.99 a month but really only watched breaking bad and 24 on it. watch more amazon and hbo go then anything

"Once I get them all ripped I was going to see if anyone here wanted a copy of it - just buy a $60 hard drive and I'd copy them over for you and ship it out."

Let me know when you get that put together, I'll send you a hard drive...

Ditto

I use my Xbox.

What does your former wife have to do with this?

I stole her Netflix password via my daughters. Free Netflix for me.

ESPN is closing in on offering their content "outside the bundle" directly to internet users but Disney is hesitant to do it. Once they do that, it's a huge step in it being over for cable. Any cable company that has not aligned itself with a true media company is toast.

as soon as that happens, Time Warner and Comcast will raise their broadband rates another $50

Well, I think actually cable will just have to have a drastic "a la carte" reorganization, where people will choose what channels they get and probably prices per channel will go up but overall bills go down as people trim the fat they never watch. The product is better on cable. I would go to ESPN+HBO internet vs jhow cable exists now in a heartbeat, but I'd prefer just choosing what I want with the quality over the cable box rather than what is currently lower quality via internet streams.

I'm at a point where I'm probably down to maybe 15 channels

Lets see

HBO
TCM
ESPN
ESPN2
SEC Network
ESPNU
Comedy Central
Discovery
History
NatGeo
NBC
CBS
FOX
AdultSwim (Cartoon Network?)

I don't think I've watched anything on ABC in years and NBC is probably only for Sunday Night Football.

My daughter watches Once Upon a Time which I think is ABC.

That's my list - If they let me go ala-carte on those, I'd happily pay $50 a month for that.

For me the channels I think we watch:

ESPN group
MLB
NBA
SportsSouth group
BBCAmerica - my boys like Top Gear. And I think that there are a few other channels that have the car shows they watch
Hallmark Group - For the female in my house whose husband has left a huge romantic void in her life...
ABC - or whatever broadcast channel that has all that Marvel crap

ESPN group
NBA
NFL Networks
NBC (news and sports)
ABC (mostly sports)
CBS (mostly sports)
BBC group
MSNBC
Fox News
HBO
Showtime
Hallmark (wife)
Whatever other channels show Golden Girls and Frazier re-runs (wife)
Nick Jr
Sprout
Disney
PBS
History
Bravo (Wife and my occasional guilty pleasure)
MTV and VH1 (a little)

HBO --doing season 1 of wire now just finished deadwood
showtime--finsished homeland--meh--now doing the affair
football all live--- i watch ----playoffs--will watch all but nfl redzone is awesome
golf channel
nascar
sitcoms on wednesday middle/goldberg/modernfamily/blackish
thursday mom and big bamg

playin mordor something or other on sony ps 4 --good game reminds me of zelda a little
and 1 movies this week django unchained
1 PBS thing about bing crosby

went to see hunger games mockingjay at movies

HBO doesn't have anything worth watching these days. I dropped my subscription. All of the good HBO stuff from the past (Except the Larry Sanders Show...still the best cable comedy show ever) is on Amazon Prime.