I had been reading quite a bit about people cutting their cable and the concept greatly appealed to me. I had become increasingly aware that I was paying quite a bit of money for TV. And I started wondering why? Why must I pay $90 a month for 200 channels the majority of which I never watch? When I have spare time, I found myself watching less and less TV, and instead working on my various projects (computer or otherwise), playing video games, or simply reading a good book. What was I doing throwing all this money away for something I wasn't using?
Most of it was my family. My wife enjoys television. When she gets a break, her preferred form of entertainment is to enjoy some television. And for my kids, it's admittedly nice to put on a show every once and a while to occupy them so either my wife or myself would be free to get done what we couldn't with kids hounding us or getting under our feet.
So I provided that to my family.
But as time went on, things changed, and the more I read about cable cutting, the more I realized we could still accomplish these basic ends, without much effort. And I'd get to build a computer as well. I'm always up for that.
When I first started seriously considering the idea of cancelling our cable, I was trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to still do. I came up with the following:
1) It must stream internet television, including BYU TV, Youtube, Hulu, Amazon, and Netflix.
2) It must receive over the air television transmissions
3) It must record over the air television transmissions (DVR function)
4) It must play mkv file formats
To meet these design criteria, I first explored off the shelf options which I'll discuss the pros and cons of each in my next post.
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