It's Been Ditched!

A couple weeks ago Dylan and I began discussing dropping our satellite TV.

The couple days before Christmas we went out and bought a digital antenna to try it out. We wanted to see how it worked and how it looked before we committed.

The antenna

We get like 35 channels, so it does pretty good. If it is in HD, we get it in HD, otherwise is just comes across a little smaller (same as with satellite). With those channels we get all the local news stations, so CBS, ABC, NBC and FOX. We have a lot of PBS. There is a Create channel and a food channel. It has ION and some other channel that are kind of movie channels. Really I think we will be set since we can still kind of channel surf and or we can just pop something we own in.

My only complaint, and this is not the antenna I believe, is that my favorite news channel will sometimes have reception issues, when none of the other stations are. We will look into it.

We also figured out how to connect our laptop (which is an old MacBook) to the TV. This was a little bit of a challenge due to it being a Mac and an older Mac. We had to get one piece from the Apple store in order to make it connect to a VGA cable and then so far we have just tested it out with the VGA cable from my computer.

It looks really good! It comes in really clear and our internet just got bumped up to 12 mbps so we haven't really had any issues streaming. I know one concern I had heard was with commercials, but it doesn't even make you click anything after the commercials are over so it really is like watching it on TV (with shorted commercials). The laptop also stays on when you have it in full screen so it doesn't fall to sleep in the middle of your show.

Right after Christmas we made the call and had them cancel our satellite. It took them about 3 days to cut it, we will get our final bill early this week and our box to ship the DirecTV boxes back should come early this week too. Then we will be all squared away.

Our new configuration seems like a great set up and I think it will really work for us. I'll be sure to keep you updated if something comes up and we change something we our configuration or have any significant complaints.

If you have any questions or are considering dropping your service feel free to ask! It's not for everyone but it is always good to see what alternatives there are out there.