A few months back I posted some questions and ideas around the Digital Cable Tuner support in Windows Vista Media Center (MCE). The idea is that you can finally get a device that allows your MCE machine to tune cable channels. I was looking forward to this because I've wanted to move to a centralized media/music/pictures/DVR server for a while.
Well, it turns out the story isn't so great here. I think I understand the whole thing here, and at the end of the day it's due to the content companies (e.g. movie & tv studios) trying to cling to the 90s and locking down all the content. Steve Jobs has recently gone on the record as saying he's not a DRM supporter and I think he's right: at the end of the day it's really the average consumer that has to put up with this stuff.
So, here's why the Digital Cable Tuner thing wasn't going to work for me. First they're *still* not really available (no one seems to really know why), second they're pretty expensive. Not only do you need a "special" PC to use one, but the tuners themselves are about $300 each. Yeah, so if you want the "record one channel, watch another" thing, you're looking at a chunk of change. Basically, to get this working it's looking like a $2500+ investment. Sorry, that doesn't work for me.
I started fiddling with Media Center at home and discovered that I can get pretty reliable reception of all the local HD channels via an antenna on my roof. So it's unfortunate that I didn't try this, oh, two years ago.
I really like the Media Center experience. Once you've got it all running it's great - it's by no means as turnkey as a cable box. Not even close. But it let's me do a bunch of cool stuff, like...
- I now have one DVR in my house. That means when I record stuff, I can watch it either upstairs where MCE is, or in my Media Room using the Xbox 360. You get the exact same experience in both places. Nice.
- I can now really utilize the Napster Subscription service. Since all my music is on here too, I can also just download albums from Napster (DRM strikes again) and play them from the media center all under the $10/month subscription, just like the albums I've ripped from CD.
- I can save all the shows I want. If I want to archive something I've recorded, I can just go to the "Recorded TV" folder and copy the recorded file into another folder.
- I can put in as many tuners as I like. Plenty of room to grow.
- I can do on-demand movies via download through MCE from Vongo or Movielink or whatever. No returns or mailing stuff back. Don't get me wrong, I love Netflix, but their days are numbered.
So once I got all of this grooving, I had to figure out what I was going to do with my cable. I was running the "Silver" package that came with HBO and a bunch of other channels I never watched. It ran me about $115 a month or something. I don't watch that much TV, and at the end of the day, the above was compelling enough for me to come up with this simple rule: if I can't get it via Media Center then, well, I guess I just don't get it.
The Comcast folks were a little perplexed when I brought back my two DVRs (- $30/month) and asked to go back to basic cable (- $40/month). They asked me why and when I told them it was clear they didn't have a cue sheet for that one. So now I don't get HBO or anything besides local HD channels (I do miss Discovery HD and ESPN HD, oh well). My cable bill has dropped about $70 a month - which is $840/year - due to DRM. If there was a sane way for me to get some of this stuff, I'd probaly still be paying to do so. I just want to use my own DVR, is that so bad?
In any case, I'm happy I made the switch. I've considered getting something like the HDHomeRun but for now, I'm going to stick with what I have...