My name is Brad Stewart. I am a student at Northwestern University in the Medill School of Journalism. For my final project, I am reporting on cable, satellite, and online television. I was hoping to speak with anyone willing to share their exprience briefly about your experience canceling cable TV. If interested, please email me at bradstewart@u.northwestern.edu. It will only take ten to fifteen minutes of your time and will be extremely valuable for my story.

Thanks,

Brad Stewart
Medill 2013

First, i started out with my Desktop. Before this whole endeavor, I moved my barely used desktop into my bedroom. For reasons that I do not care to explain, I ended up hooking the PC in there to the 17'' monitor instead of in my living room that houses a 50'' plasma. This desktop is a pretty solid PC. good graphics card, proc, but more importantly, a 1TB hard drive. About a little over a year ago, I decided to put all my digital media that I have obtained on this hard drive. So, while we are in bed, we can have access to every television show and movie that I have on that computer using WMC for windows 7. Honestly, although it lacks some of the bells and whistles that it could have via plug ins, my biggest turn off for this program is the fact that audio syncing seems to be off at times. currently, I am checking out a number of other programs out there, but currently I am still on the hunt for the right one.

Forget the Keyboard and mouse! Although I do still have a wireless keyboard an mouse stowed away for when I actually want to treat my media center as the computer it was naturally put together as, I solved my problem by heading over to ebay and purchasing a cheap $10 USB remote control. It has more buttons than you will ever need which integrate with WMC exceptionally well.

Of course, my bedroom is not the only room in the house, and is certainly not the place I do most of my TV/Movie watching. In my living room, I have an Xbox 360 that is hooked up to my prized 50'' plasma TV.

There are a few ways that you can watch digital media on the xbox. I first tried the whole syncing the xbox media center to my desktop's media center. I was not a fan of this for very long, as I found that Xbox media center was very particular on which files it decided to be compatible with.

I solved this first by simply using the video library function under “My Xbox”. After setting up my media hard drive as a shared drive on my desktop in the bedroom, I was able to browse and watch the videos on my xbox remotely. This worked quite well, and I was able to get some of the files to play that I was unable to do with the media center function.

I went even further my installing TVersity on my desktop. Tversity makes it a little easier for those who are not especially savvy with setting up shared folders in windows. With little configuration, it allows your xbox to see your media with ease, as well as gives you a few more bells and whistles like being able to watch youtube and hulu videos. TVersity also claims that videos will be encoded so that they will be compatible with xbox playback.

Either method, video playback quick and quality has not suffered a bit as long as you don't have your home networked bogged down by downloading or other bandwidth intensive activities.

All in all, I have said good bye to cable and I never plan on going back.

Love the story. Another thing wort pointing out is that if you DO decide to spend a little money, you can add Netflix to your setup and either stream the movies over the net, or just play them on the HTPC DVD drive. There really is no need for Cable anymore. Now if they can just find a good device to replace the keyboard and mouse. The logitech Dinovo that was mentioned looks good, but does it really work?

Also, once the PS3 adds Hulu support again, you should be good. Or doesn’t Tversity add Hulu and all the others too? That would make the PS3 the best alternative.

Another note, if you are in the market for a new internet/cable service provider, don’t just go straight to the company. Check out the deals through stores like Radio Shack and Best Buy, self installs (especially for internet) are sometimes easy enough, and you can get perks like gift cards or free installation.