How Do You Get Live TV?

Lake House only gets OTA channels ABC and CW. So we use Direct TV satellite but we split the bill between us and another household we each have a receiver. We also carry the receiver with us to the beach house and we used to carry it with us in the RV before we sold it.
 
We use a Tablo Over-the-Air [OTA] DVR. They just came out with their 4th generation recorder, and you can watch (or record/replay) the 4-tuner version allows you to watch or replay 4 deferent programs on 4 separate TVs at the one time. We've used Tablo for over 4 years, and only use streaming for special programs that aren't yet available OTA. Has been been very reliable, and now you can even get Tablo recorders at BestBuy. Or you can order from Amazon or directly from Tablo. Has been quite reliable for me.
 
I signed us up, again, for YTTV after staying off any live TV offerings for a year or two. Good sports offerings which is primarily what I wanted, along with CNBC and a few other channels I needed. I will cancel the service after March Madness and then start it up again for college football around September. We also have Amazon Prime Video and some free offerings like Pluto TV. This year I wanted to watch the games of my favorite NFL team since they are now competitive but since I am out of their market we get few of their broadcasts. Signed up for an NFL+ subscription for about $70 for the year; allows you to watch any NFL game broadcast immediately after the conclusion of a game. Worked well since I usually taped any games in the past that I wanted to watch to avoid the commercials, and NFL+ does that for you automatically.
 
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We have a Televes digital TV antenna in our garage - pointed to the nearest major city - over 60 miles away. The distance is why we chose to go with an upgraded digital antenna rather than some of the less expensive options available. We receive all the channels we want - NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, PBS and a host of others. With digital TV there are a number of "side" channels that have additional programming. For example, the main NBC affiliate may be channel 11.1 but they have weather, movies, documentaries and sports on 11.2, 11.3, 11.4 and 11.5.

AntennaManPA.com has lots of useful information about cutting the cord. He has a YouTube Channel too.
 
I finally cut the (basic) cable a few years ago. For last football season, I picked up Hulu Live and I was underwhelmed by the broadcast quality. I have 100Mbps internet service (Comcast) and I am single so the only load on my bandwidth when I was watching football games was Hulu. There were pauses in almost every broadcast and jerkiness too. Admittedly, that could be somewhere on my end, but the picture quality I had with basic cable was much better.

I was also unhappy with the price I had to pay to watch, on average, just 3 football games a month at home. Hulu Live / YouTube TV don't include ESPN (Monday night football) in their basic packages, which cost ~$65 last year. And Thursday night games require Amazon Prime now, so all in all, I felt it was a bad deal and I didn't sign up again this season.

I've tried various OTA antennas at ground level, including outside once, but the location of my house just leads to poor OTA reception. This season I used football games as social occasions, but I'm determined to try an antenna one more time by putting it on the roof once the weather improves.

I guess I should add that my favorite team happens to be the "home" team in my area so its games are always on the major networks except as noted above, when they're not playing on Sundays. That's why basic cable worked for me in the past. They just don't offer any affordable packages anymore.
 
I use an antenna, with a DVR and that covers most of my viewing. 37 channels for free in the St. Louis market, which is fine. There is still so much to watch from that one avenue that I really wouldn't need streaming, but I stream with a Roku anyway, which is free. By the way, I have over 600 channels from the Roku since I like to add apps to it.

I use TitanTV.com for a TV Guide-type listing of what's available from the TV. It has a full listing of all the over-the-air channels, and can look ahead two weeks from today to see what's available. You can also do searches on anything, including genre, and you can set up permanent searches when you want to catch anything you deem special. When I see something I like I'll record it using my $40 over-the-air DVR.

I don't see why everyone doesn't do this. Really convenient, and I watch as much as I can handle.

I also watch YouTube via my computer a lot!
 
NoiseBoy said:
Hulu Live / YouTube TV don't include ESPN (Monday night football) in their basic packages, which cost ~$65 last year.
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Hulu+Live has definitely always had ESPN in all their packages and now for $1/mo extra you can also have ESPN+ and Disney+ - we’ve been subs for years. Not to pick nits, just didn’t want to misinform another reader.
 
TomJ said:
We use a Tablo Over-the-Air [OTA] DVR. They just came out with their 4th generation recorder, and you can watch (or record/replay) the 4-tuner version allows you to watch or replay 4 deferent programs on 4 separate TVs at the one time. We've used Tablo for over 4 years, and only use streaming for special programs that aren't yet available OTA. Has been been very reliable, and now you can even get Tablo recorders at BestBuy. Or you can order from Amazon or directly from Tablo. Has been quite reliable for me.
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Just ordered the latest Tablo (4th Generation) OTA DVR for $75 from Tablo. Included a little discount for being a 1st time buyer. I already have an antenna that picks up all local channels so I didn't get theirs.

I'm dropping Sling in a few days as I have it only for college football so will be a more hardcore cord cutter the next several months. I will have Hulu for a year at $1/mo and Starz and Peacock both each at $3.33/mo for several months. With all the free stuff on the net I will have more than enough to watch. The Tablo device will be nice in tying the OTA channels together with recording capabilities. And you can record live streaming channels too according to videos I watched.
 
Had DirectTV for years; biggest issue was receptions during thunderstorms.
But then monthly cost was going higher & higher...
Dropped it & got YouTube TV for about $70/mo.
 
This topic comes up regularly, as Michael indicated. But I'll report again my set-up.... several rooftop and attic antennas connected to several attic tuners (Silicon Dust) which are Cat-5 connected. DVR functionality using a Windows-based solution that I have participated in writing starting back when Charlotte was a test market for digital OTA signals. The other developer has actually got it up on the Windows store now (CW_EPG). To make it work well, you need a paid subscription to listings (Schedules Direct). He's tried to get it to work with free listings, but I'm less certain that's reliable. I have PBS shows that automatically record, and we will sometimes time shift a football game, but never watch live... can't stomach commercials at all.
 
Dawg52 said:
Just ordered the latest Tablo (4th Generation) OTA DVR for $75 from Tablo. Included a little discount for being a 1st time buyer. I already have an antenna that picks up all local channels so I didn't get theirs.

I'm dropping Sling in a few days as I have it only for college football so will be a more hardcore cord cutter the next several months. I will have Hulu for a year at $1/mo and Starz and Peacock both each at $3.33/mo for several months. With all the free stuff on the net I will have more than enough to watch. The Tablo device will be nice in tying the OTA channels together with recording capabilities. And you can record live streaming channels too according to videos I watched.
Click to expand...

I was just looking at Tablo today. Please report back how you like it.

I just canceled the tv part of my cable bill and will only have internet going forward. I have an antenna in my attic which gets all the local channels including our PBS station. I’d like to record some of those (PBS) shows plus the football game when it’s on our local fox channel. Tablo looked like it could do the job just fine. One thing I read is that if you want high definition tv (as is broadcast), you have to hook up an external drive to Tablo. The internal drive is a flash card and the system automatically compresses the signal so it can store more on that drive.
 
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Jerry1 said:
I was just looking at Tablo today. Please report back how you like it.

I just canceled the tv part of my cable bill and will only have internet going forward. I have an antenna in my attic which gets all the local channels including our PBS station. I’d like to record some of those (PBS) shows plus the football game when it’s on our local fox channel. Tablo looked like it could do the job just fine. One thing I read is that if you want high definition tv (as is broadcast), you have to hook up an external drive to Tablo. The internal drive is a flash card and the system automatically compresses the signal so it can store more on that drive.
Click to expand...

That's a bummer. I'll report back when I have it up and running.
 
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For live TV I have Directv Stream. Has all the networks I like and lot's of on demand stuff. I watch everywhere... At the gym while doing cardio, in the waiting room at the doctor's office, in the car and yes, at home too. The app will install on smart TV's or an external device like a Fire Stick as well as any other device... phone, tablet, computer. I installed the app at my daughter's house to watch while visiting. You are permitted to install the app on up to 3 TV's outside of home. I like the cloud based DVR which has tons of storage. I also like how you can back up many shows to the beginning so you can watch the whole show even if you missed the beginning. It's not the cheapest streaming service but has more channels than most including some that no one else has.

https://streamtv.directv.com/stream-packages/
 
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We got rid of cable/satellite services a couple of decades ago and went with a $100 Clearstream outdoor antenna. We watch very little local TV because of the constant interruption with repeating and annoying local ads. Local news shows are also pretty lame with all the useless "fluff". With Samsung Smart TVs there are dozens of free channels that play many of the same programs. We also have Netflix and PBS so there is more than enough programming for us in addition to local programs.
 
Sunset said:
Our antenna is the old analog type, but since all towers switched to digital it picks it up fine. I don't think there is really a difference in antennas between digital or not.
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You are correct, there is no difference between an antenna and when that is hyped as a Digital antenna.
Also the descriptor of 150 mile antenna is also hype, "VHF/UHF radio wave propagation is normally limited to line-of-sight, meaning the antennas at each end must have a clear path between them (no obstructions such as buildings, trees, and particularly, the earth)." There is some atmospheric reflection that can happen, but then, any antenna can pick it up. When I lived in Michigan there were some late nights when I could get a TV station in Wisconsin.
 
We dropped cable 5-1/2 years ago, I put up an antenna. We have Amazon prime which gets some streaming use. My wife uses our kids Netflix and one other streaming service I don't recall. We also have a cheap IPTV service that has a thousand plus channels. It came in handy for a football game that was not broadcast locally. I found an NBC channel in Des Moines Iowa that had the Buccaneers game.
I spend most of my screen time on the computer streaming Youtube videos.


If you want to build a simple antenna I'll post this design a friend came up with. I have built 5 of them for friends and there are no complaints, the one my daughter has in Bradenton get 72 stations. I now have friends building them for their friends.
The first one I built was a rush job I built with cardboard and aluminum foil, my daughter showed her neighbor in the apartment and he was mad because the $68 antenna (about 10 yrs ago) he had bought, received no better the the cardboard and aluminum foil antenna.
 

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We have both a winter home and a summer home and use YouTube TV as our source for "live" TV. Also purchased NFL Sunday Ticket from them, first time ever, and enjoy watching whatever NFL game we want. One benefit from streaming vs. cable is that we can place our TV's anywhere in either house, which gives DW lots of ideas on re-arranging furniture (!!!). Not being tied to 1, 2 or 3 cable outlets per house is a great "un-intended benefit".
 
Jerry1 said:
Please report back how you like it.


I have an antenna in my attic which gets all the local channels including our PBS station. I’d like to record some of those (PBS) shows plus the football game when it’s on our local fox channel. Tablo looked like it could do the job just fine. One thing I read is that if you want high definition tv (as is broadcast), you have to hook up an external drive to Tablo. The internal drive is a flash card and the system automatically compresses the signal so it can store more on that drive.
Click to expand...

I got the Tablo all set up today. Took about 20-30 minutes. After scanning my channels it showed all the local channels that I'm supposed to get. But when going to the guide there were several channels that were listed but no detail on the grid about the shows. And as a result I could not play those channels. I noticed where some of those are internet channels as well so maybe it won't show duplicates. Tablo's website says sometimes those will appear in a day or two after night updates. So will see how those go. But I do get all the major networks including PBS to show under locals and those are the main ones I will record from anyway.

I test recorded a couple of programs and the quality of the picture looks about the same to me as live. I read a couple of reviewers on YT say there is no difference but another one said there is a slight difference and that a hard drive may improve the picture a tad. I'll probably add one at some point but in no hurry.

Overall I like the device and think it will serve my needs. FF, pause and rewind all work well on live and recordings. I do wish they included more internet channels like I can pick up on Roku. I would like to be able to record movies off the Cinemavault channels. Perhaps more will be added in time.
 
We don't.
 
Looking more and more like this may the the year of NEXTGEN TV for me.

The major stations by me are going to Nextgen soon. The main advantage for me is better reception. NEXTGEN signals should not drop sometimes like currently.

More on NEXTGEN TV in case you haven't heard of:

https://www.watchnextgentv.com/
 
Dawg52 said:
I got the Tablo all set up today. Took about 20-30 minutes. After scanning my channels it showed all the local channels that I'm supposed to get. But when going to the guide there were several channels that were listed but no detail on the grid about the shows. And as a result I could not play those channels. I noticed where some of those are internet channels as well so maybe it won't show duplicates. Tablo's website says sometimes those will appear in a day or two after night updates. So will see how those go. But I do get all the major networks including PBS to show under locals and those are the main ones I will record from anyway.

I test recorded a couple of programs and the quality of the picture looks about the same to me as live. I read a couple of reviewers on YT say there is no difference but another one said there is a slight difference and that a hard drive may improve the picture a tad. I'll probably add one at some point but in no hurry.

Overall I like the device and think it will serve my needs. FF, pause and rewind all work well on live and recordings. I do wish they included more internet channels like I can pick up on Roku. I would like to be able to record movies off the Cinemavault channels. Perhaps more will be added in time.
Click to expand...

That's the new generation Tablo. It has better (or no?) encoding than the old ones which fuzzed the picture. It also has those "internet channels" which I don't understand. Maybe some day you post a screen shot. I may end up getting one someday. I still want to get my money out of my old one for which I paid a lifetime subscription for the guide. They don't do that anymore.
 
JoeWras said:
That's the new generation Tablo. It has better (or no?) encoding than the old ones which fuzzed the picture. It also has those "internet channels" which I don't understand. Maybe some day you post a screen shot. I may end up getting one someday. I still want to get my money out of my old one for which I paid a lifetime subscription for the guide. They don't do that anymore.
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I experienced some issues but think I have worked out most of them. Just the other day I told Jerry I was going to return it but will probably keep. The live content looks good. This is a screenshot of the Saints game on now from my IPhone . I’ll probably get a hard drive for better picture quality. The internal drive for recording is pretty good tho.

Sorry for the rotated pic. Don't know how to square it up.
 

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