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2.11.2010

Living without Comcast Television Service

by John Calian | Link to this article
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Its been 6 months now, and I can comfortably say I rarely miss having 800 channels of television pumped into the HDTV via Comcast. We moved into a new house last August, and my wife and I made a deal to swear off paying Comcast $140/month for the TV service. Though we fretted a bit that we would be missing out on Bravo, ESPN, HBO, etc, the real issue we faced was: could my wife deal with my solution for our new alternative TV reality: running everything thru a Mac onto the HDTV. Plus, some over the air via a HD antenna.


With Comcast + TiVo, there was one remote that was fairly simple to use, one interface to master (TiVo), and more than enough programming. But, it cost more than the value we thought we were getting.

The solution: Macbook + HDTV + iPhone as remote + Hulu + Netflix + TiVo + Over the air antenna + BitTorrent + Boxee

The results: Overall, we are very satisfied. Quite a few programs we like are free over the air (in HD) and we pay TiVo ($14/mo) still to record. Netflix has LOTS of streaming content, and at $10 bucks a month we get good value and utility there. Hulu works very well, even the HD content. And you will find shows you never knew existed. I still miss ESPN, but espn360.com makes up for part of that by streaming live and replays of some sporting events. Add in the content we get from bittorrent, and we have an overabundance of video to watch.

As far as accessing all the content, using Boxee is fantastic, it does a great job of organizing the locally access content, Netflix and Hulu (though we often just go to Hulu.com). And accessing over the air content via the TiVo box is status quo.

And the iPhone remote capabilities are not perfect, but more than passable.

So, we save some money and are living in the IPTV world for the most part. Its not a bad place.

Next, its time to finally cut off the terrestrial telephone...

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2.01.2010

Can I Jump from Apple to Google?

by John Calian | Link to this article
Topics: | | |

With the coming tide of Android devices, and the promise of Chrome OS, it appears Google will have ability to offer consumers a new choice in operating system platform allegiance. Interesting.


I have been an Apple convert since 2006, and seriously love my iPhone + MacBook Pro setup (not to mention the iMac in my kitchen and Airport Express' running speakers in the house). But, it does cost a lot to maintain the Apple allegiance.

However, there is a compelling reason to change over to an Android phone + Chrome OS Setup other than price: network reliability. ATT has been underperforming (I know they think otherwise, and also promise to make things better), and the amount of dropped calls I experience (problem amplified since my wife has an iPhone) is ridiculous. Not to mention that when I attend a sporting event or something of that magnitude, the data connection is a complete failure due to ATT's network caving to the overload.

So, feeling pressured to buy a new gadget (no, not the iPad), I am eager to investigate a wholesale move to Google once the OS is released. At that point I would run the OS on a current machine I own, and move over to an Android smartphone. The entry cost is not that big, and I could run the device on TMobile to compare if their network is any better. No, I dont trust any of my peers to tell me otherwise.

As for running Chrome OS instead of Mac OSX, well, most of what I do for personal reasons can be done thru a browser. And I am a fan of Chrome (the browser) on both Mac and PC.

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