Where was I?

Here we are, four years into the experiment of living without cable TV in the house, and everything is ticking along fine. The main reason is that over that time, the media industry has become competitive for the cord cutters dollar and options have increased greatly. I am sure there are readers out there who have been living happily without a cable bill for a decade or more and giggle at our paltry four years.

But four years it is, and counting.

In December 2012 we abandoned cable TV and subsequently our monthly bill of around $80 disappeared. We had already been using Netflix for a year or so at that point and that was eight bucks a month and in addition, to take advantage (at the time) of the USA Netflix library, we were subscribing to the Unblock-US service, a smart DNS that tricked the geoblocked content into being available.

Netflix have since fixed that backdoor, but we enjoyed the US content for some time and during that time, the Netflix Canada library became humungous. Unblock-US is still very useful, and I'll probably talk about that in a future post.

So, back to our start in 2012, our setup then was a Roku 2 XD, an Apple TV 2nd generation and a Dell Optiplex 960 desktop attached to the TV via the Displayport connector. The Apple TV and the Dell made use of Unblock-US and in addition, the Dell had a half-height ATSC card installed and I attached that to an external 8 bay antenna.

I will check if that was the original cord cutting setup.

I hear distant mutterings now about the cost of all this and I will address your concerns as we progress. If you go back a couple of posts you will see my comment about being revenue neutral on tech stuff, and as with many things in my life, I keep track of cash and I had made a promise to myself, and the missus, that all my tech purchases would come from eBay profits and not from the household budget and true to that, every piece of our 2012 setup had been funded in that way.

I'm off to dig out a photo or two, will be back soon.