Anyone with kids cut the Cable/D* cord?

[IVB]

The upside of the Google drama is that i'm looking at my setup for the first time in *years* since it was uber-stable. I'm realizing that nearly all our shows are available either HD-OTA or via HuluPlus. The one thing I can't get are the kids shows. They're all either nick.com or WB shows. But $75/month will buy a crapton of DVDs.

Anyone with kids cut off cable/direc-tv? How'd it go, what did you do about their shows?

[Fuzzy]

netflix streaming does seem to have a LOT of kids show DVD's. though that may be a bit more repetitive than the broadcasts. I've got enough kids shows backed up on my server I could probably last a couple years before my kids noticed there wasn't anything 'new' on there...

[pknowles]

My wife and I are considering the same thing. Except for Sprout, the rest of our shows come through OTA HD. I have let Sage go crazy in the last month grabbing as many of the kid shows as possible before we cut the cable TV (have over 200 episodes of The Wiggles). Of course I still need cable internet service.

[pknowles]

BTW, like Fuzzy, we have Netflix streaming and there are a fair number of kids shows.

[drewg]

Originally Posted by IVB

The upside of the Google drama is that i'm looking at my setup for the first time in *years* since it was uber-stable. I'm realizing that nearly all our shows are available either HD-OTA or via HuluPlus. The one thing I can't get are the kids shows. They're all either nick.com or WB shows. But $75/month will buy a crapton of DVDs.

Anyone with kids cut off cable/direc-tv? How'd it go, what did you do about their shows?

I have a 5 year old. I cut the cord and migrated to a PVR / OTA setup (first MythTV, now SageTV) before he was even born so he's never seen cable, except at his grandparent's house. I have about 250GB of recordings of educational kids shows from PBS that he watches. When he receives a DVD / BD as a gift, I rip just the feature. So he's never been advertised to, and he's never seen most of the crap that passes for kids shows on the cable kids channels, and only knows vaguely about shows like that from his friends in pre-K. My wife & I like it like this. We figure he'll be advertised to all his life, lets give him a break when he's young


Drew

[wayner]

Netflix has a lot of the kids shows like Dora, Diego, Backyardigans, Thomas, etc. There is also an OTA kids channel that is a sub of ion called qubo that may help - it doesn't have Nick shows but perhaps the kids will get used to the shows that they have. Then there is also PBS which has kids shows on the main channel and the Thinkbright sub which I get from Buffalo, NY.

[IVB]

Let D*/Sage go nuts, lift the max cap, and record it all, alas what a brilliant and simple idea!

The wife can't watch RHONJ/RHONYC/etc (and pity on those of us who know what that means) as only 1 show is available on bravo.com and no idea how to get that via SageTV, but I asked her if she'd be willing to pay $75/month for it. Maybe I can even get her to stop watching such trash

[brainbone]

Cut cable awhile ago, and my kid is just fine without it. She finds plenty to watch on Netflix -- and much of it is far better than what was available on Nick, etc. She's taken to watching some of the Nature documentaries lately.

Have OTA for a few shows, but I'm fine waiting a year to watch everything else. My wife misses Bravo, Food network, etc.

[lotusvball]

I cut the cord about 4 months ago and the kids and wife adjusted fine. We do miss somethings but get most stuff. Sports in the fall might be an issue but it is not worth the price for cable. I use Netflix to get some dvds, Playon for some of the cartoon network stuff and a few other kid programs. I found the kids are watching better and less tv then they use to. My dvr setup is a split between OTA and QAM. I need to add an amplifier to my antenna, but we get most of what we need.

[tsitalon1]

Sports by far is the thing we miss most.

Kids are fine with PBS and Netflix, even better if you torrent here and there.

Sports I miss

[RazorUK]

I find I can't cut the cord myself due to live sports. I need the live premier league football and I can only get that on the high packages of Dish/Directv and Cable..... I find myself paying way too much for 4-8 games a month.

No easy solution to that either, although Fox Soccer have just released an online service that is available on Playon.

[Trepidati0n]

Originally Posted by RazorUK

I find I can't cut the cord myself due to live sports. I need the live premier league football and I can only get that on the high packages of Dish/Directv and Cable..... I find myself paying way too much for 4-8 games a month.

No easy solution to that either, although Fox Soccer have just released an online service that is available on Playon.

Find a group of friends to split the cost with one friend and go there. Be a nice social engagement and reduced costs.

[RazorUK]

Originally Posted by Trepidati0n

Find a group of friends to split the cost with one friend and go there. Be a nice social engagement and reduced costs.

True enough, but most of my friends don't like the 5:30am start time in Idaho for these games

[cjalphonso]

I cut the cord over a year ago with a then 4 and 6 yr. olds. They really haven't missed it at all. I did up my blockbuster plan so they can go once a week and get shows for the week, still a whole lot cheaper. Also, check out your library, ours has a ton of kids shows on dvd and they are all free. The kids really enjoy going to pick out there shows...everyone is happy

[clayfree]

We cut the cord almost 2 years ago and I would say our quality of watched shows has only improved. It was always too easy to just bring up the guide and watch or record whatever was on. Cutting the cord made us think about what we wanted to watch. We set aside time for movies we wanted to see. We kept Sage and used our antenna for ota which has the majority of content we were watching.

By cutting cable we just git rid of 90% the fake reality shows. Some people love them but not us.

Playon is a great way to get lots of content and it will play to anything that can receive Upnp, plenty of cheap boxes will handle that or you can do it through Sage. They have 3rd party plugins that scrape content from every network. Plenty of kids plugins too.

I ended up with xbmc because the pluging are more direct. I use one plugin called Free Cable that scrapes every network. the others I have are Cartoon Network, HGTV, DIY, etc.

I do miss the sports. Many games are on ota networks but I miss espn the most but one channel was not enough to keep an entire sat package. If you are lucky you can get espn3 and everyone has plugins for that. My cable ISP put in a nice clause that you can get espn3 only if you subscribe to espn on their cable network ... nice

[rwc]

Goofy question -- or maybe it's just my perception -- but to get a "solid" and "fast" internet connection, my options seem to be:

1. Use the cable company (in which case, I need "basic cable" -- or their bundled "triple play")

2. Use the phone company (which means fios -- which gives me about the same situation as #1)

SO I guess the question is, how do you cut out the cable but still get a reliable and fast (over 2mbs down) internet connection?

[mistergq]

Originally Posted by rwc

Goofy question -- or maybe it's just my perception -- but to get a "solid" and "fast" internet connection, my options seem to be:

1. Use the cable company (in which case, I need "basic cable" -- or their bundled "triple play")

2. Use the phone company (which means fios -- which gives me about the same situation as #1)

SO I guess the question is, how do you cut out the cable but still get a reliable and fast (over 2mbs down) internet connection?

I was just able to start an order for fios with only 25/25 internet at $85 per month. That really is not a good deal, but you can get fios without tv or phone. Our fios is just internet and tv.