Cable Freedom, Aided by a Mouse – NYTimes.com
Those devices are all behind me now. I disconnected everything, threw it to the side and canceled the cable months ago. Instead, now I have a Mac Mini, wireless mouse and a Microsoft Xbox hooked up to my television.
I’ve been doing this for years. I have uTorrent download the few shows I want to watch via RSS automatically, then stream them to my Xbox 360. Thankfully with Windows 7, I can now view them through the Media Center function on Xbox, which previously could not read DivX and forced you to go through the less powerful video player.
When I want to watch something that is unreliable through Bittorrent (which is pretty much any show broadcast daily. For me it’s occasionally The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, but for others it might be The Tonight Show, etc.) I use PlayOn ($40 to purchase, no ongoing fees) to stream Hulu to my Xbox. It even lets me fast forward through the commercials.
The setup is not quite as seamless as cable and a DVR. Hulu keeps trying to break PlayOn and other software like it. They’re never more than a day or two behind with a patch, but still it gets annoying at times. Also sometimes it just won’t work, for no reason I can determine, until I reboot my computer.
Bittorrent is far more reliable. If you’re watching any once a week show, there’s an RSS feed for it, and the only bottleneck in the streaming process is your home network. For less than you pay for cable in 2 months, you can get a nice 802.11n router and matching network cards, which will greatly increase range and throughput.
Still, it’s a lot cheaper. I’m saving probably $1,000-$2,000 a year for a service I barely used.
The only real loss (and it isn’t much of one for me) is there are no live sports. You cannot simply watch a hockey game at home. But that just means the Stanley Cup gives me a reason to get out of the house, which is not a bad thing anyway.
