While there is plenty to watch on broadcast TV nowadays, it isn't as much as there is on cable. The things that you find on cable that you can't find on broadcast TV include:
1) Sports events. For die-hard fans who absolutely want to see every sport from every league or college conference, cable (and satellite, etc.) has plenty to offer that broadcast TV does not. For example ESPN and its many channels aren't offered over the air, and several college conferences (the Big 10 and SEC being two notable examples) have their own networks.
Fortunately, there's a way to get much of this, which I'll cover later on.
2) Movies. While there are movies on broadcast TV, it's limited to a few stations a few times per day and to what the stations want to show.
There are several ways to get around this, covered shortly.
3) Specific genres. Interested in Golf? There's a golf channel on cable. Shopping? There are several shopping channels. Health? Several of those exist. Travel, history, old-time TV shows, kids' shows, family programming, adult programming, news from all parts of the globe, Spanish-language programming, do-it-yourself, tech, business channels: all of these and many more are found on cable. And as said often, Fox News live and many other networks can only be found on Pay TV.
4) Recording: Cable service usually comes with the option, via a DVR, to record shows for later or repeat viewing. There's a way to get this for broadcast TV as well, and I'll touch upon that in a later post.
The good news is that you can also find many of these on streaming services.
REQUIREMENTS FOR USING STREAMING SERVICES WITH TV:
ROUTER: You're going to need a router. You probably already have one, especially if you have a mobile device. You'll need it because you're going to have to connect your modem to both the computer and to the streaming devices.
BANDWIDTH: While it's possible to watch Standard Definition (lower video quality) on as little as a 500 Kb/s connection, a bare minimum of 3 MB/s is recommended, and 15 MB/s or higher is probably best to have. If you're going to be doing heavy downloading or uploading on your computer, if you have several devices connected to your router, or if it's busy on the internet in other ways, you might want to have speeds of at least 50 MB/s. Most service providers have these capabilities.
DATA ALLOWANCE: If your Internet Service Provider (ISP) has a data usage cap (and most do), make sure it's at least 250 Gigabytes if you plan on doing serious streaming, and more is better.
WHAT ARE STREAMING SERVICES?
Broadcast, cable, and satellite TV are essentially audio and video via the airwaves or digital lines. A streaming service is also audio and/or video, except that it's delivered via the internet. There's a small to large difference in quality, depending on how fast your internet connection is and how good the streaming service's network is. Many people can't tell the difference.
It's no longer necessary to stream video to your computer. There are several streaming devices that will stream directly from the internet to your television. Many TVs (commonly known as "Smart TVs") come with such services built-in. There are also many standalone devices that work with a TV. Some of the more popular are Roku, Chromecast, Amazon Fire, and Apple TV. The one I use, which is also the one I recommend and will discuss, is Roku.
THE ROKU: THOUSANDS OF CHANNELS.
By "Channels," I don't mean TV stations or networks, although some are exactly that. "Channels" in Roku-speak means an application that's loaded into the Roku and which performs a function. Some of those are elaborate, some are very specific in nature. While other streaming "boxes" (devices) also have their own following, the Roku is far and away the most diverse of these, and it isn't close to second place.
The Roku comes in four generations: Roku, Roku 2, Roku 3 and Roku 4. Don't bother with the original Roku. It doesn't have enough features for a cord cutter who wants to stream. Each succeeding generation of Roku is faster and/or has more features to offer. They range in price from $45 to $120. For our purposes the Roku 2 --- and that's the Roku 2 that Roku currently makes, not the original one from a few years ago --- will suffice. This device typically sells for $60. In the next post, I'm going to show you how to get one for free.
Setting up the Roku and finding the many channels it has to offer is beyond the scope of this post and will be covered later. Such information can also be found elsewhere. The Roku is the device that I recommend, partly because it's the only one that currently supports Sling TV (covered in next post) that can be viewed on a TV (unless you want to jump through technical hoops to do it another way, and if you do, these articles are probably too primitive for you in the first place).
When you have your Roku or other device up and running, here are three of the streaming services you'll probably want to have:
NETFLIX: This is practically a must-have for any cord-cutter who wants to watch movies or binge-watch TV series. For $8 per month, Netflix offers tens of thousands of movies and episodes of TV shows, as well as its own original programming. The amount of content is mind-boggling, and no other streaming service has as much that's included in the monthly price. Also there are no commercials.
If you haven't ever used Netflix before, you can try it for one month for free. Note that they will auto-bill your card thereafter unless you cancel.
http://www.netflix.com
HULU PLUS: This is another popular service. While Hulu Plus has some of the same content as Netflix, it also carries current-season TV programming right up to the episode that aired the day before. The service costs $7.99 per month. The downside is that there ARE commercials, however you can subscribe to a commercial-free version for another $4 per month ($12 total).
Hulu is more geared towards TV than movies; they have much content and much more current content than Netflix does. The tradeoff is the commercials or added price to get rid of the commercials.
AMAZON (PRIME): You can't actually buy Amazon Prime video itself. It comes bundled into the regular Amazon Prime service, which costs $99 per year. If you already subscribe to Amazon Prime, you also have Prime Video. If not, the other main selling point of Amazon Prime is that it offers free two-day shipping on all orders that include products with the "Prime" classification, which means most things sold on Amazon.
Prime video is also commercial-free. While they don't have nearly as much content as the above two, they do have some content that others don't. Amazon also offers the option to rent (watch; sort of a "Blockbuster" for the internet) or buy (via download) several movies, TV show episodes, and even TV show seasons, that aren't included in their free Prime video service.
Except for Hulu's recent-TV shows option, most of the things offered on these services aren't recent-run. But they're great for those who want to binge-watch a TV series or a set of movies involving a certain actor, movie sequel, or time period. They also don't need to be recorded; whatever they have can be watched whenever you want. They're available. One caveat is that certain production companies tend to withdraw their movies and shows when contracts expire, so what's on a service today might not be on that service in a month.
In the next post, I'll show you how to get back some of your cable TV channels --- at a fraction of the cost. It's known as Sling TV.
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