This article was written by Don VanSyckel, the club president, as a part of "The President's Pen". This article appeared in the November 2018 WYSIWYG newsletter.
Cutting the Cord part 1
by Don VanSyckel
Well I took the plunge or possibly I should say cut the cord. We have WOW service and previously we had both internet and TV for the ridiculous amount of $146 a month. When I contacted WOW about switching to internet only I mentioned that every week or so I get an ad from Comcast. I was offered 100 Mbit service for an average of $36 a month with a two year contract. With no plans to move, I took the deal. I have not signed up for any internet based services yet. We do have a Roku on each TV. Roku is a small hardware box that connects to the internet and drives the TV via an HDMI cable. There are quite a few channels available on Roku including their own channel. I've watched a few movies on the Roku channel, the movies here are both free and pay, I choose only the free ones. I was actually able to select movies that I wanted to see as opposed to ones I settled on just to see something. Roku offers a few "new to Roku" movies every month. Roku supports many services such as Netflix, Vudu, Hulu, YouTube, Craclkle, CoolFlix, Tubi, HBO, Showtime, and others.
As a test while watching a movie, I paused it, went to another TV, selected the movie via that Roku, and the movie picked up where I had paused it on the first TV. I should have mentioned that when you have one or more Roku's you need to sign up for an account at the Roku web site, no charge.
In the past I scanned through a couple of the other free movie services. Downside is none of them offer a method of selecting a particular movie. You must scroll through the list of available choices and select from this list. Most times the lists are at least categorized by genre.
A couple years ago I saw a review for what appeared to me to be a pretty good HD antenna. After reading the review I went to the product web site. There was a deal for three antennas and I ordered them. When they arrived I tried one and it worked well but I didn't want to switch wires between the cable and the antenna so the antennas went in a drawer. Now with no cable, I got the antennas out and hooked them up. They are only 9" X 4" and thinner that some cardboard. The TV channel scan yielded 21 channels of some interest. There were others that I'm choosing to ignore. There are six major channels that we had received on cable. Each of these have one to five additional channels that we previously had no access to. For example, PBS is 56.1 and in addition there are 56.2, 56.3, and 56.4 each with their own programming. The only down side is I have not found one web site that lists all the channels. I have found the full channel listing by going to the various web sites for the station owners such as ABC 7, CBS 62, NBC 4, WADL 20, and WTVS 56.
An associate at work reports that he bought an outside antenna for $60 that gets quite a few more channels. It depends on where you live and what stations you are interested in as to whether an inside antenna will do or if you need an outside antenna.
Last but not least, the public library offers a wide selection of movies and TV series. I believe all the public libraries are in a library coop and you can order items on line from any library and pick them up and return them at your local library.
So when I exhaust the library and the free content on the Roku channel, Vudu, Hulu, and others, I'll consider Netflix, Amazon Prime, or other paid content. Until then I'll just pocket my $109 a month savings.
End of Article