Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Cutting the cable guy

Cool, except that you can't do the $.99 rentals on the gen1 AppleTV. You can only buy TV episodes at $2-$3 each. Only the gen2 ATV can do the $.99 HD TV rentals.

Congrats on the switch! Not having TV can save many mountains of time. Also, if you watch some shows online, you get less commercials, and never have to worry about when a show airs, ever. Kudos!

Not until they start adding them in.

Ah, true. However, it does appear that I can share my library. I typically download everything to my Mac Mini's iTunes library. I use that at the master database, which I share w/ all the iTunes clients. The AppleTV seems to show all the TV shows under Shared TV Shows and plays them fine in HD over Wifi (11n 5 GHz). I tried it last night by downloading some free TV pilot episodes.

Does anyone here use Playon? This looks very interesting. I figured out that since I'm still a Comcast customer, I have access to ESPN360 and Xfinity on Demand, but only on an Xbox 360 or PC/Mac. But if I run Playon from a PC, I can get all my web content streamed to my PS3, Roku, iphone and possibly my Tivo. In that case, I can forego Hulu Plus and stick w/ all the web content I want.

So far the experiment is going very well. I only miss the occasional NBA game but other than that, I love saving the $80/mo.

Seems that users have created a Playon plugin environment. I noticed a NASCAR one, didn't see an F1 though.

You're still a customer of Comcast for ISP or for TV?

Can you view the Playon content directly on a PC, or does it only work as a server for the other devices?

Yeah, Comcast for cable modem. My only other option is ATT for DSL and it's doesn't go faster than 3Mbps. I can't give up 12 Mbps anymore.

Playon seems to be a server for DLNA clients. It has the added bonus of making web content easily available to those clients.

http://www.playon.tv/playon/demos?id=ps3

I gave up cable about 7 years ago, and never looked back. What helped was that the Phildelphia area had a large number of early OTA HD providers, so after buying a box I was getting HD for years ahead of the swutchover(although in the early days it was only prime time shows being broadcast in HD).

I'll confess that not having the sport channels is tough. But during baseball season my wife and I cope by going out to a local sports bar once a week. It's still cheaper than cable and it gives us an excuse to get out.

Where are you at in the Philly area Cork? I've thought about trying OTA, but am out in Chester Springs and don't know if it would make it out there. Don't want to give up Sportsnet either....I could live without everything else but broadcast channels though. Certainly silly to pay whatever it is for cable a month just for Sportsnet.

Cheaper to buy a slingbox HD for a neighbor with sportsnet with the agreement that I am allowed to connect to it when I want to watch a game

I would do the MLB package for baseball, but that local area blackout kills that idea. Football is still broadcast TV, and I can live without Flyers games, and don't really watch the Sixers (maybe they'll get good again someday).

I'd love to get rid of cable and do everything OTA and online.

Those of us who live in Canada... in the sticks, hate you!!