We’ve been talking about ditching Cable TV for a while. We pay over $700/year for a few hundred channels that we don’t watch. There’s never anything on, the DVR that comes from the CableCo is crap, and we don’t feel like buying a new TiVO to handle HD content.
The MythTV setup we have is OK, but it’s SD-only, and without the tuner we’re missing out on a bunch of the channels anyhow.
So, what now? I’ve spent some time looking at VUDU, AppleTV, and other options. VUDU seems kinda neat, but we already have an xbox 360 and the HD movie rentals on it look just fine. What I’m interested in is AppleTV’s ability to get real TV programming, legitimately. Torrents are fun and all, but A. I don’t feel like being on the wrong end of an IP infringement suit, and B. torrents have a low WAF value.
Having decided to hitch my wagon to the Cupertino star, I came pretty close to pulling the trigger on a 160GB AppleTV, when it occurred to me that I might not have done enough research. After poking around some more, I’ve decided that the best option is a Mac Mini… It’s a few hundred bucks more, but totally worth it. There’s no downside… The Mini comes with FrontRow, same as the AppleTV. But it also comes with a DVD player, a full OS with web browser and all that good stuff, and it can play formats other than .mp4. Now it’s a no-brainer.
Let’s look at the math:
Cable TV: $720/year
1.83 GHz/1GB/80GB Mac Mini + mighty mouse + keyboard: $728
HDMI <-> DVI Cable: $20
headphone <-> RCA adapter: already have one in my bins somewhere
For hardware, the first year would be a wash. But, we need to factor in content costs…
Figure that on average, we watch 1-2 hours of TV every day. Usually, though, that’s just crap that we can both agree on, or else Law & Order before bed. Looking through the store, there are a bunch of shows (Weeds, other Showtime/HBO stuff) that are a bargain to get, and we’d both find interesting.
In the end, I’m not sure that we’d save all that much in month-to-month costs. However, we wouldn’t be paying good money to subsidize the 99% of crap that goes alongside the 1% of interesting stuff we want to watch. Plus, cable companies suck.