Cutting the cord April 15, 2010

Apparently an increasing number of people have decided to “Cut the cord”, and go without cable service at all. I can happily tell you that if you’ve got the right set up, you won’t miss it.

In 2004, we got tired of our Comcast cable service cutting out constantly, and we realized that we just weren’t going to re-arrange our lives around when certain shows were going to air, and what we did watch was on for background noise. I’d long ago set up a PC to act as a media center to play movies, as well as emulators, so the equipment was already in place. The missing equation was BitTorrent.

Other peer to peer services were primarily catering to music or movies (definitely falling in the “illegal” category), but BitTorrent was the first peer to peer service that had an increasing number of television shows, often collated together by season. Even better, grabbing shows that weren’t available domestically (like the brilliant Brass Eye series) were being shared out. Once we started grabbing back episodes of shows we’d missed, we realized we were watching more television via BitTorrent than we were via cable. So, we cut the cable and canceled our Comcast cable service.

The first thing we noticed was the blessed absence of commercials. There would be the odd episode where someone didn’t edit out the advertisements, but we didn’t miss them at all – in fact, going to public places (bars or restaurants) where there were televisions, or at the home of a friends where the TV was on, we found ourselves sucked in with absolute fascination. When Christmas rolled around, we were far less stressed because we missed almost all of the blaring and blasting commandments to spend money.

We also found that we’d consume shows differently. Instead of watching a show with one episode a week, we’d end up waiting until a few months after the last episode in the season aired, and would watch the entire season over the course of a few days, and then move on to something else. We also found ourselves watching shows that we’d only heard of and had recommended to us. Overall, we found that we were simply quite a bit happier with what we were watching, because whatever was on the television was what we wanted to watch, and not just watching TV to watch it. And with the addition of Netflix instant streaming to the mix, we were totally set.

There is the question of legality – with basic cable, you’re probably breaking the law, even though you could grab most of it over the air via UHF. When it comes to premium cable, you’re definitely running afoul of the law:

Mistakes were made, but let’s not dwell on the past.

With the advent of HD television, there is a trade-off… You can easily put together the pieces needed to make a 1080p compatible media center PC, running virtually any OS, but it’s only as good as the source material. Most standard definition items are recorded from standard def broadcasts, and it’s easy to see (especially with HDTV) how unpleasantly crappy the compression algorithms are… which are then re-compressed with whatever codec the video you’ve downloaded was compressed with. HD versions are often available, but they’re usually three times the size.

Finding what you want to watch is fairly easy – meta search engines like Scrapetorrent allow you to specify the season and episode, and will collate results from multiple torrent sites… just beware that most torrent sites are funded by less than upstanding banner ad servers. You’ll want to make sure that you use a safe browser setup (I recommend Chrome with flashblock enabled). You’ll also run across bogus episodes that are password-protected RAR files, exhorting you to pass along your credit card for the unlock code (I don’t really need to tell you that doing this is fantastically leotarded, right?)

We’ve got cable once again, as a freebie through our apartment complex. We’ve found that we still watch most of our favorite shows via BitTorrent or waiting for it to be available via Hulu or Netflix instant… and we’ve also found that we can usually clock most car commercials as such simply by how insipidly stupid and pandering they are. And our irritation around the Christmas holiday consumer frenzy returned full-force this year.

But when it comes time to move, we’re not going to pay for cable television… the way we like to watch TV has changed permanently, and we’re happier for it.