Getting Rid of Comcast – Finally!

Recently I made the move to drop my Comcast Cable.  I simply don’t watch enough TV these days and with the economy being the wonderful thing it is, saving some extra money each month is a much welcome thing.  On top of this, Netflix now offers more and more streaming movies and Amazon allowing you to rent movies and TV series for a low cost; it just makes it more and more practical to go “On Demand” for just about everything!

So.  I did it.  I finally took the plunge to get rid of the Cable TV bill that I really wasn’t using.

The Savings

Went from about $150 per month to about $60.

$90 / Month = $1,080 a year.

Wow!

What did I keep from Comcast? High Speed Internet (which I still think is the best out there) and something referred to as “Limited Basic” cable which I’ll talk about in a minute.

How does it all work?

So… There is no shortage of electronics; the good news is that I had much of this already running.  The core of the system is a Windows Vista Home Premium machine running Windows Media Center.  Media Center has just about the best DVR software I know.  They even combine the ability to look up data from the internet giving you a really rich browsing, searching and watching experience.  It also can play your music collection, do slide shows of pictures and other cool stuff.  Totally great. 

Now that you have something to record the TV, you need to get a signal to it.  This is the cool part! 

To do this I’m using a special networked TV Tuner called HDHomeRun from Silicon Dust.  This is an amazing little device that will decrypt the HD signals that are broadcast Over-the-Air (OTA or ClearQAM) and pump them into your network.  There are a number of “free” channels that available and have great fidelity.  Pure HD.  Most notably all the main networks: CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox.  There are a few more channels as well but this gets you quite a bit for free.  If you think about the great content that’s on network evenings these days, it really carries you a long way. 

In order to to actually get a signal to this little device you need to either use an antenna or you can do what I ended up doing.  Thanks to a user over at The Green Button I leant that you can get a service from Comcast called “Limited Basic Cable” for $16.50 a month.  This is pretty much just the network channels and doesn’t require any box from the cable company to run.  By simply hooking up the HDHomeRun to this cable signal it will decode the HD channels! Simple as that. After you hook this up to your network, Windows Media Center finds the channels and the two tuners on the HDHomeRun pretty easily.

The one tip I have after all this.  Make sure you have updated your network adapter drivers and the firmware of the HDHomeRun.  You’re asking it to push quite a bit of data over the network with the HD signals; worth making sure that you’re as optimized as you can be.

There are some other pieces of equipment I use to get this to all work together:  An XBOX 360 as a Media Center Extender (Also works as your Netflix Streaming front end) and a Linksys Media Center Extender for bedroom.

All-in-all I’m totally happy with the experience.  I’ve been recording shows like Lost, Heroes, Life, 30 Rock, The Office and others flawlessly for 2 months now.  Never a missed episode.  On top of Windows Media Center being simply a better experience, having a much reduced cost per month is the biggest advantage.  I can live without the cable channels for that!