"Cutting the cable cord"........

No personal experiences but The Tech Board has a long thread about it. Setups. Experiences. and whatnot

LINK

I've done it, or pretty close to it, Jefferson.

Got a $25 rabbit ears antenna that picks up CBS, PBS, and NBC. Depending on where you live you may get more channels or less channels.

I do Netflix, which is an excellent value IMO.

During football season I do sling, which is sort of a-la-carte cable. Costs $20 a month for the most basic channel package (sports wise that is just ESPN and ESPN2). For an extra $5 you will get ESPNU and SEC Network, and there are other packages you can add on aimed at kids, spanish language channels, HBO, etc.

The best thing about sling is that there is no contract. Just cancel any month and then pick it back up again any time. The drawbacks are no DVR option, and you will need a pretty good internet connection for it to work properly. They let you do a week free trial, I recommend it.

I freeload off my sister's HBOGo account so that has everything on HBO, doesn't cost me anything.

So all told, during football season I'm paying $25 for sling + $8 for Netflix.

Once college football is over I'll only pay for netflix.

We use a roku box to run all of this. Those cost around $70 I think and are pretty easy to use. It essentially "hosts" all of these channels or apps (like netflix, sling, etc.). Those will last you a long time. I think I bought mine in 2011.

Enjoy cutting the cable cord. I've never missed a game I wanted to watch, and I'm pretty sure it's saved me around $3000 since I did it almost three years ago.

We cut the cord last month. We have a HD Antenna for local channels, Sling TV, Netflix and Amazon Instant Video. I use a Roku, Chromecast and PS3 to stream to our tvs. Roku has a ton of free content. Will still have Comcast internet since it is our only high speed option in our area. Should be changing sometime in the near future with Google Fiber coming in to our area.

I live in one of those fiber optic areas and had Verizon fios for three years, great service, horrible price. I have the same thing now from Comcast at 60% the price. Verizon is leaving the market next year. Question is what will Comcast charge once that happens? Who knows.

buddy of mine has one of the kindle fire tv things and uses his phone/wifi/hotspot capabilities to stream certain APPS through it...he pays next to nothing...

I dropped my cable to the basic plan. $20 a month. I use Netflix and torrents the most.

Edit: The data cap makes it to where I can't cut completely. I have kids that need to be entertained every now and then.

We cancelled our cable subscription when moving to our new house last year and got Sling TV instead. It has worked well for us, but unlike other streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, etc.), it only allows one feed per subscription, which means you can only be logged in to the app on one device at a time. That's not an issue for us, but might be for others.

Using Sling, Netflix, and our HD antenna has not given me any regret over cutting cable.

We did it for about six months then went back to Comcast entirely because of sports. We had the HD antenna and did Sling TV. You can only have sling playing on one tv at a time. The feed would also cut out sometimes. Mr Fin missed a game-changing play because the feed cut out right at that moment. And that was the last day we used Sling.

I love my setup of basic cable, a triple tuner networked HD Homerun Prime and Windows Media Center DVR on Windows 7. I don't rent any expensive cable boxes and I can still record from three protected HD channels simultaneously while watching a fourth.

I just canceled my $130/month Direct TV. I got myself the Amazon Fire Stick Hacked. For the $60 hacked fire stick I get all the sports channels, movies that are still in theaters, free pay per view, free HBO and Showtime. You seriously can't go wrong with this device. I wish I had gotten it sooner.