I was wishing I could watch the Tiger games this week, and as we have no cable TV we cannot watch them. The sports franchises and owners have a complete lockdown on games being shown outside their most profitable ecosystem.
Well, I got to thinking…didn’t we used to be able to watch games on regular TV? I have a very expensive HDTV which, unlike many new TVs, actually has a tuner in it.
I did some fast research on antennas and after a trip to www.antennaweb.org I figured out which type I needed (small omni-directional). I went to Amazon and got a $34 RCA unit that’s flat and black and has an amplifier.
The hardest part of the setup was loosening the TV and getting the coax plugged in. Once it was all set up, we instantly got all the on-air stations in my area. So now we have all the major networks and it’s all free.
And one more thing too: because cable companies compress the ever-loving crap out of their signals in order to fit more channels into their bandwidth, the over-air broadcasts of HDTV look FAR better than cable. In fact, they look almost three-dimensional if you’re used to seeing HDTV from the cable company.
Needless to say we watched the Tigers game last night in glorious 64” HD. And the Tigers were so happy they decided to win the game for us.
That did it, the final nail in the coffin of cable TV for us. They can keep their $150 a month monstrosity, we can now see every show we want to watch. I’m so glad we dropped that. We saved $900 this summer alone!
1 comment:
Good to know! We ditched cable a few months ago and haven't really missed it. But it would be nice to see sporting events sometimes. We were wondering whether getting a new TV with a tuner would be worth it. (Our TV is ancient; I'm pretty sure you've gone through at least 3-4 since I bought mine.)
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