All right, who’s doing this no cable/satellite thing? Need to hear from Canadians due to the stupid rules that prevent some foreign content from being delivered and I’m not entirely comfortable with the idea of handing my c/c number over to an entity that’s willing to help me break the law / violate copyright distribution agreements.
I cut the cord a few years ago. Don’t miss it one bit, aside from live sports. Still haven’t figured a way to stream NHL games aside from hockey night in Canada on CBC (without paying a stupid amount of money that is).
Everything else I can stream online. I have an Apple TV I can remote play to through my tv, or just hook up the laptop via hdmi. I actually prefer my TV this way, as now I watch what I want, when I want to without having 30000 channels of digital wasteland.
I cut the cord back in 2008, after the soccer Euros. The wife and I were looking at monthly recurring cost, looked at the amount we paid those Rogers rat bastards every month, and looked at each other and said “Ah fuck it. If we really miss it we’ll take it back”. Haven’t really missed it, except for sports.
I was able to buy packages from TSN for e.g. the Euros in 2012 (where we flamed out pretty badly, so that was a waste of money), and CBC had the Olympics and the 2010 soccer worlds. Cycling I get from steephill.tv who point you to reflected streams of debatable legality, but since no Canadian station broadcasts it anyway I don’t feel very bad over that. ITU has great packages for the WCS, and WTC has crap streams of various events, but it’s better than nothing.
I refuse to pay for the outrage that are the NFL and NHL packages. Apparently MLB is better/cheaper, but I don’t care about baseball. I have no idea about the NBA and CFL (so now you know what my pecking order is).
You can get access to hulu and selected other US content through http://www.unbock-us.com. It’s not a proxy, but similar. What they do is for those sites they fake your DNS (your computer’s domain name lookup service) to point to an US IP address they have and they forward from there. So instead of netflix.com pointing straight to netflix’ servers, it points to their American IP address, and they send it along to the real netflix. Netflix then thinks your request comes from an American IP address (unblock-us’s) and gives you American content, or in the case of hulu content instead of a FOAD message. The awesome thing is that for Netflix you can choose between a bunch of countries, not just the US. My wife is very happy that the Dutch netflix has season 3 of Downton Abbey and way more Modern Family than the US or Canada.
I am told that the unblock-us model is legal, but if it’s not it’s not my problem. The worst that can happen is that they get shut down. It costs about $5 per month, and you don’t have to install dubious proxy software on your computer.
My kids whine every now and then, but I just tell them that if they insist they can pay the cable bill. That shuts them up. They are mostly on youtube and netflix right now.
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I am in Toronto area, via antenna I get CBS, NBC (sometimes), ABC, FOX, CTV, CBC, Global, City, PBS, OMNI, TVO and a few others. Between all of those, I can get a lot of NFL, some hockey, most event sports like Olympics, and World Cup and all the usual shows.
Add netflix (US and Canadian via proxy), hulu and things like steephill, and I don’t miss cable at all. I am not a huge fan of watching commercials OTA, or via network streaming (since I have no PVR), but it is a small price to pay - especially since my wife and I don’t really watch TV (the kids on the other hand…).
As the other fellow said, cut it and if you miss it go back - but you won’t.
Instead of unblock-us, consider going with something like: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com.
Unlike unblock-us, it’s a full VPN, so all your internet traffic is encrypted and goes through their servers. This makes it useful for not only streaming things from other countries (they have exit servers throughout the world) but also doing online banking from your laptop on a public wifi, making it a little harder for the NSA to spy on your browsing habits and hiding the traffic when you download any torrents of questionable legality.
I use them, speed has never been an issue and the cost is only $3.33 a month.
and you don’t have to install dubious proxy software on your computer.
not saying that this site is not trustworthy, however you are underestimating what it means to switch your DNS server: it means that from then on the site you choose can send you to whatever site they want when you access it (i.e. if you type yourbank.com it could send you to bad-guys.com behind the scenes, who could steal your banking info then transparently forward you to your bank’s website, or it could install malware on your pc via a drive-by attack and do other bad things to your network etc.)
Just because it’s not installing anything on your computer it doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous