I keep hearing about streaming TV devices like Roku, but don’t really know much about them. We currently have Time Warner Cable for TV and internet. We don’t watch a whole lot of tv, and usually use the TW DVR for watching later.
If we were to ditch and get a streaming device, can we still record shows? Can we get local shows for weather, weather cancellations, etc?
Can we separately buy services like HBO? Any information would be welcomed.
AFAIK, HBO GO (streaming) is available only to cable subscribers of HBO. Which means, in effect, that you need to have/keep your cable subscription in order to dump cable in favor of HBO streaming. Catch-22. I know this is a big sore point for many fans of Game of Thrones.
It’s going to take a long time and a lot of bureaucracy before it’s anything more than a supplement for cable.
You can always get any local channels that you can receive over antenna. But to have DVR functions for those, you would need a box with a tuner in it, like a Tivo.
Channels with a long history of cable contracts, like HBO, are generally not able to provide streaming except to customers who already subscribe to HBO through their cable company. I’ve heard that Europe doesn’t have this problem and that in the US, Comcast has started a test market for internet with streaming HBO as a package without cable. So maybe in another few years to a decade it’ll be doable.
I was hoping that a Netflix streaming account and an Amazon Prime account would allow me to have everything I need to drop cable, but the content wasn’t complete enough.
You know how people have always said that cable should provide an a la cart option so you don’t have to pay for ESPN if you don’t watch sports or pay for Lifetime if you don’t hate yourself? Well, at some point Netflix, Youtube, and other streaming companies who are making exclusive original content will likely eat enough of the market that they’ll be the new networks, and we’ll have our wish. You’ll know we’re close when Congress introduces legislation that protects the cable companies from these freeloading streaming services using all their network bandwidth.
Speaking of HBO, Time Warner just put out a new offer:
We don’t have cable. Full stop. 
I have a little box by a company called Silicon Dust. It has two ports on the back. You put a splitter on your antenna just before the TV and put the other into the box. The box also has an ethernet jack, so you put it on your network. In the box are two tuners.
That’s the extent of the setup.
Then you take any Windows PC (probably Mac and Linux options too, if that’s your choice) and launch Windows Media Center. It finds the tuner, builds a grid of shows, and then you can watch live and/or record. Since there are two tuners you can record two shows, or watch one live while recording another. If you have two PCs on your LAN you could watch two shows. If you connect two boxes to your LAN you have four tuners instead of two.
Windows Media Center works really well for recording. The whole reason I set that stuff up was so my wife could record Dr. Oz. Once you tell it to record a series it just does it. Something happened once and it deleted all the Dr. Oz. I had deleted an episode after she watched it, but instead of deleting just that one it deleted them all. I really don’t get how that could even happen. But that only happened that once.
My laptop is within 8 feet of my AV receiver, and it has an HDMI cable, so I can stream recorded shows to the TV. Usually we just watch them on the laptop though.
As far as the rest goes, it’s kind of hit and miss. My blueray player is internet ready, and that’s basically like Roku or whatever. There’s stuff there, but it’s “go out and find the programming” The only thing I use it for is occasionally to watch NBC’s Meet the Press.
Last weekend my wife wondered how the Clemson / USC game was going. I figured it was probably on ESPN so I went to the website to see if there was a way to get the score and status of the game. Turns out I could just click a link and stream it live. It was probably a higher quality image than most people get on cable, although the picture did occasionally break up.
We watched Under the Dome last season. We frequently missed the live broadcast so I went to the network’s website and streamed the show the next week, using the HDMI option. That worked out good. And if old shows (think Captain Kirk) are your thing, you can stream a lot of that for free on Hulu. We did that with Dracula and it wasn’t as good. Too much compression ruined the stunning visuals that I like the show for.
We had Netflix for a while. I loved it for obscure documentaries and TV series. We watched all of Lost in about a month, and the first season of Walking Dead in a weekend. We changed our credit card though, so Netflix closed the account. My wife was good with that because she didn’t think they had enough new releases. She kept wanting to watch this movie or that, which was out on DVD, but never on Netflix. I got season two of Walking Dead on DVD, since we don’t have Netflix anymore, but haven’t watched. I need to get more seasons of Californication – one of the funniest shows ever.
The BlueRay player has a Sony app. You can stream their movies one-off after you set up an account. The prices vary by tittle and resolution. Sometimes $6 or $8. Seems kind of high to me. We’ve used it a couple times and it works.
So there you go – I don’t know if that answers all your questions, but it relates my experiences.
It’s a DVR that uses your PC’s for storage. I used to do that with a Hauppage Win-TV USB device.
I like that Silicon Dust did theirs as a network device and added multiple tuners. But does it have HDMI output? If so, and it allowed using your TV to view shows saved on a PC, that would be a good 2-way solution.
Oooo, they do seem to have a DVR version that supports external storage. Still would need an HDMI port for me, though.
The one I have isn’t a DVR at all. It’s just a dual tuner that connects to the LAN. Ethernet is the only output. The PC becomes the DVR.
Oh wait, you can stream to a Roku to get it on the TV. That’s a good idea.
I know, but I need those cycles. All my PC hard drives are generally busy. I like the idea of a self-contained streaming DVR that is basically an NAS.
I like the idea too, but no one makes one that doesn’t get hammered in the reviews for overheating, locking up, or just being generally unreliable. Next best thing is maybe to buy a used PC at the Goodwill and put it in a closet to do the DVR function.
Your Goodwill must be nicer than mine.
Interesting that there are so many problems developing a self-contained unit. I think I could do the same thing with a RaspberryPi, a harddrive and a Hauppage USB tuner. Hmmmm…
Those tuners get bad reviews too.
It seems like they’ve all just cut too much of the quality from the units and they overheat. I think I read one where a guy took one of them apart to put a better heat sink on it and then it was fine. Maybe someone has improved something though and come out with one that works.