charcaroth

January 31, 2010 at 6:40am

I've already cut cable video service (in spite of having competing providers in my area) in favor of Dish Network, where I can split my signal to pipe either the primary or secondary tuner on my 722k box to every coax drop in the house and can expand the DVR's holding capability to an external USB hard drive.  That being said, I'd ditch the whole setup in a heartbeat if I could have a functional set top box that provided a clean interface at least 1080i, provided seamless connectivity to various internet services (e.g. Pandora, Hulu, internet radio, and kept those services open to upgrade with firmware) and let me select my own cable package.  I'd like to "accidentally" ditch Lifetime, Oxygen, the Hallmark Channel, and any channel that shows American Idol, so my wife would stop taking up valuable DVR space with that drivel.  Channel by channel is the way to go, provided it still comes out cheaper than the current package.  Keep in mind that there's always the chance that we could end up with each non-network channel costing $3 a piece in this situation due to Roku's lack of collective clout due to the number of their boxes sold.  Hopefully, though it would involve trade-offs, too, such as taking Home Shopping Network to get ESPN free or Turner Classic Movies to get WTBS.  Of course, if the ISPs' desire to cap our bandwidth is allowed, the whole idea goes right down the tubes--not to mention compressing the streams so it'll deal with my packet-lossy 8mbps down/1 mbps up cable modem service.  The DSL in my area is atrocious, and I'm not holding my breath for FIOS from my tiny telephone collective, since they're barely able to keep a clean dial tone over copper.