Cutting the cable for the new world of social TV

Posted by Cory Bergman on October 18, 2010

Welcome to our first installment of a new series here on Lost Remote about cutting cable (or satellite) service and embracing a new era of web-powered social TV. And what better way to write about it than actually cutting the cable. Cold turkey.

That’s what my wife and I did Friday after our Comcast DVR failed for the last time. After sending a tweet to Comcast proclaiming, “We quit,” they promptly picked up our cable box on the front porch. (Yes, they’re very plugged into social media.) Since we’re fans of Comcast’s internet service, we kept that part of our triple play package.

With college football just hours away, I needed to wire up a short-term solution: plugging our Mac Book into our old HDTV set to stream ESPN3. We drove down to the Apple store and bought three cables for a total of $90. We wired a HDMI cable into our TV set using this adaptor (we had to run audio separately), and that night we were watching 30 Rock via Hulu. It looked better than expected, with fewer commercials.

As for college football, we were saved by ESPN3, which required us to authenticate that we’re Comcast high-speed customers (which is kind of funny, when you think about it). The video quality isn’t as great as Comcast HD cable, but hey, it’s as good as standard def — other than a few jitters — and completely free. For the record, we get 20 mbps download speed, and we may consider upgrading to the 50 mpbs option.

Unfortunately, we missed our Sunday NFL games, because they’re not yet available online (except for Sunday Night Football on NBCSports.com). So our next step is to buy a HDTV antenna (and tuner, since our TV doesn’t have one) for over-the-air broadcasts.

Stay tuned, as we’ll chronicle our adventure to switch entirely to web-powered (and over-the-air) television, with a focus on social TV. For now, we’re leaning toward buying one of the new Sony-Google TV sets, which caught my wife’s eye when she realized she could watch video while updating Facebook and Twitter in a picture-in-picture mode (above.)

Have ideas for us? Leave ‘em in comments below…

Filed Under Cutting the Cable, television

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