Apple TV 4 and Cable Cutting Basics

One of the surest ways to save on the high cost of cable if you are an Apple TV 4 user, is to get a good digital over-the-air antenna to pull in your local channels. (We use a $50 MOHU Leaf indoor digital antenna. We're in a very mountainous area and so we use the amplified model.) We don't have a big outdoor antenna and we use a simple indoor antenna that gets us over 20 local channels, even in our heavy wooded mountainous surroundings. We get all of the major networks and independents, other than CBS. But CBS is not worth staying on cable for and many of its best programs can be found at the CBS website, or at services like Netflix, Amazon, and others. CBS Sports has a free app for Apple TV 4 and they were even showing Super Bowl 50, live on their website and app, absolutely free.

DO NOT get one of the cheap $10 or $20 antennas, as most of them cannot scan in the sub-channel or side-carrier frequencies. Many channels today broadcast in the sub-channel frequencies and cheap antennas often miss the sub-channel stations. For example, in my market area, a free sci-fi service, COMET, broadcasts on WTTO which has a feed on 21.3. Some digital antennas will only scan channel 21, for example, and would miss COMET at 21.3. (To learn if COMET is available in your area, please visit http://comettv.com/ and toward the bottom of the page, you can enter your zip code.)

Now that you have taken care of the local independent channels and networks, the Apple TV 4 can fill in some of the holes left from cutting the cable.

Build a battery of great free apps on your Apple TV 4 and duplicate those apps on your iPhone and iPad. Make sure to grab Tubi TV, Crackle, popcornflix, OVguide, Pluto, PBS, Smithsonian Channel, and others that look interesting.

On your computer, build a web folder in which you put shortcuts to your favorite network sites because many are now making their content available on their websites. Mirror those shows onto your television screen using Apple AirPlay. You can also add that folder to your iPhone and iPad and watch web-based content there, as well as mirror it to your television using AirPlay.

A $20 a month Sling TV package will take care of many of the most desired cable channels like AMC, ESPN, HGTV, History, A&E, etc. Visit www.sling.com for details of their channels and packages. There are no contracts and you can test the system before joining.

If you must have HBO, you can add it for $5 a month at Sling TV, rather than pay double or more as you would with most everyone else.

Put the $100 a month or more that you will save into other things you'd much rather be doing than giving it to the cable company.

Happy saving!

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Why and How Television Is Changing

Whenever new things come along, they nearly always attack the low-end of the market first. Why? It's the least defended market segment and the one that well entrenched companies will sacrifice while they focus their attention on their most profitable customers. That is good business.

The problem comes in when aggressive new companies learn to expand their now successful appeal to their initial low-end market, expanding that market by manageable and systematic bite-sized chunks that chew off just a bit more of the market with each new foray up the market strata. The day eventually comes when these new companies supplant their predecessors, who were once the giants -- giants who fatefully hid behind the "higher end wall" of their own profitability until the wall that was their comfort, one day became their prison.

A good example of this is seen in television itself. When cable first came along it was tiny, mostly unwelcome and the vast majority of customers saw no reason to pay for something that had been free for decades. It took many years, but one day the broadcasters themselves were being bought by the very companies who had only decades before, been mere distributors of their programming.

Broadcasters and film studios and others, have watched cable companies become some of the richest companies in the world, as they distributed and marketed the very programming created by the studios and broadcasters. As is often the case, the middleman made most of the money.

I am sure that had to be the burr under their saddle, especially when the day came that Comcast announced it was buying NBC/Universal. That had to be a wake-up call to the industry. They couldn't do much about it because the studios and broadcasters had lost the direct contact with their customer. Few were using antennas and most customers were now fed by cable.

That has changed and now the internet and very sophisticated compression/decompression algorithms (codecs) give studios and broadcasters a chance to learn from the cable companies and reach out directly again to their customers.

Today, some studios and broadcasters are taking the fight direct to customer and are willing to give their content free to the customer, settling for the direct commercial revenues earned by advertisers wanting to watch their programming.

You see this on two fronts:

First, major film studios like Sony Pictures and Paramount Pictures are leading the charge from the major studios. Paramount has partnered with an investment group to put 20,000 titles from the Paramount library into free on-demand viewing under the name of Tubi TV. Sony Pictures is putting many of its productions into free on-demand viewing under the banner of Crackle.

Why hide? The answer is simple: they do not want to devalue their trademarks by mentally associating their brand names with free content, but they do want to take steps to build their own direct customer base -- one in which not only do they earn ad revenues but also over time build an outreach to market to the very customers who enjoy their content. It's a win-win for both the studios and the customer.

Some free channels you'll find on Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV 4, etc.

The hiding and free content isn't just limited to film studios. First in for major broadcasters is Disney/ABC who hides behind the name Free Form, where Disney/ABC gives away many of their shows to an on-demand audience. They are joined by another early adopter, Warner Bros. Television, whose programs are now trickling out for free under the CW Seed moniker.

Joining these early adopter networks are "aggregators" like Pluto TV, a service whose efforts catalog many web-based video services and serve them within a single interface.  One of Hollywood's film distributors is behind OVguide, a service that includes free movies, episodic television, documentaries and other programming.

As these bite-sized chunks are bitten off and more and more of the audience watches free movies and television shows on-demand on their phones, tablets, computers, and on systems like Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV and others -- they chew off more and more of the market, until one day like the cable companies themselves, they will transform the very market itself.

Cable cutting is helping drive this phenomenon but to be truthful, it is a minor player compared to the Gen Xers and Millennials who prefer all their content to be on-demand and at their beck and call.

Today, I noticed that YouTubeRed was advertising the first-run new release of a major film that will be premiered on YouTube, not on the big screen nor on any of the major networks. But seeing that YouTube already has more viewers than any network I can name, the move is less a surprise than it is an "about time" recognition of what is already far too obvious in the market.

It's a brave new world for studios and broadcasters and in it, content is king. The traditional means of distribution will give way to a more direct-contact model. Paramount, Sony, Disney/ABC, and Warner Bros seem to already be recognizing that change. Many more will follow, they will have to or they will find the biting chewing away their part of a onetime major part of the market.

This is a fundamental and far reaching change. It puts the customer in a market in which middlemen will find it harder and harder to justify their high cost of entry to get the same programming that the customer can get for free with a bit of effort.

How much will convenience prove to be worth is the question that customers will have to learn to ask themselves.

#cablecutting

Apple TV 4: First Impressions

We have just purchased and installed the new Apple TV 4 and have begun getting to know it. It's clear that this is a new environment and so there are not as many apps as there are for Roku or Amazon Fire TV. While you may read claims that say that Apple TV 4 has over 2600 apps, Kathlyn and I have been digging through the App Store and not even a search turns up far too many of our favorites.

But if you have a big investment in Apple products and you use the Apple iTunes Store for much of your media purchasing or renting, do not let the shortage of apps dissuade you from going with an Apple TV 4. The number of apps is sure to change quickly as Apple TV 4 is only a few months old now and already it has some of the great free cable cutter channels like Tubi TV (Paramount Pictures), Crackle (Sony Pictures), popcornflix, NFB One, Pluto, PBS, Smithsonian Channel, Free Form (Disney/ABC) and a number of others. The offerings will grow fast, you can bet safe money on that.

So far, we have been able to build a free TV package on our Roku that includes 113 apps that we actually use. On the Apple TV 4 we have been able so far to find 29 apps. Again, expect this to change rapidly, as Apple TV 4 is a completely new Apple TV system that is unlike any of the company's Apple TV models that have come before. Apple has never supported open apps before and while I do believe they are overstating their case when they discuss the number of plug-ins available, there is a comforting elegance to its apps that longtime Apple users will appreciate.

As I suspected, the apps in the Apple TV 4 Store are very well done and they all work using the same kind of restrictive Apple developer uniformity that makes for much less confusing performance than some of the apps we have found and use on the Roku and Fire TV devices.

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Don't Waste Money On Smart TVs You Don't Need

One thing that people spend a lot of money on, which in many cases is not a good use of money -- because they are paying for duplicated features they likely get from other options -- is buying Smart TVs.

Smart functions built into the TV are very expensive and add hundreds of dollars to the cost. You often do not need them because you get the same functions in Blu-ray players, Rokus, Apple TVs, Amazon Fire TV and many devices.

Major brands like Sony, Samsung, Toshiba, and others, make big mark-ups on their smart TVs. More economy brands like Visio and others, will add around a hundred dollars or so to the price tag. 

We bought a 50 inch basic flatscreen TV made and branded by TCL. TCL is one of China's largest companies and they build sets for many other companies who then market them under their own name. It was a non-smart TV and was nothing more than a 50 inch monitor with so many I/O ports that it was amazing: three HDMI ports, TV/Cable/Antenna, Component, AV, USB, and even a serial port if you wanted to hook up an old computer to the TV. It cost us about $325 on the Amazon Deal of the Day. (I signed up and watch for deals like this.)

TCL makes a Smart TV that is just a built-in Roku and nothing else and it is a great buy if you are sure Roku is the way you want to go.

I just ran over to Amazon just now and I found this Sceptre non-smart TV that sells for far less than a same sized Smart TV. If you plan on getting or already use smart devices, why pay for them twice?

http://www.amazon.com/Sceptre-E505BV-FMQK-50-Inch-1080p-HDTV/dp/B01138JKJO/

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A great free channel you will find on Roku

The Roku Sci-Fi Station

I haven't yet found this station on either Apple TV or Amazon Fire TV -- if you have, please comment below -- but Roku users who enjoy science fiction and fantasy will like this great free channel.

Sci-Fi Station is full of recent release newer films, not the old sci-fi that you might expect from a free service. It hails from the people at OVguide and they seem to have a lot of recent Sony Pictures fare for you to explore.

Many if not most of the movies were made in the 2000s and tend to be far better films (in my opinion) than most all the other free sci-fi channels.

Check it out if you use a Roku.

Cable cutting is about freedom and user advantage

We are about to turn off the last of our Dish Network package because we have added a digital off-air antenna through which we now get our local networks for free.

We got one of our two Roku devices by paying our Sling TV bill in advance for three months. When that 90 day period runs out, we will likely turn off our Sling TV package for a few months, restarting it when the college football season begins again, and HGTV has had a chance to get more new episodes into their coffers. ESPN/ESPN2 and HGTV tend to be the main channels we watch in the Sling TV package. But we have been getting so many other channels and services now, that we are not really watching Sling TV.

When we turn off the Dish Network account and later temporarily turn off Sling TV, our total monthly television bill will be less than $19 a month. When we move the $10 a month we've been paying Dish Network for our local channels and allocate that $10 to Netflix, we'll be up to $29 a month.

When college football season begins again, we will restart the Sling TV package, which will add $20 a month to the bill. Because there are no contracts, when football season ends, we will likely turn off Sling TV after the five month college football season because football is my only real sports passion.

The ability to move money around and turn on and off services that you are not under contract with, is one of the great advantages of the world of cable cutting.

There are so many free channels we are finding, that we seem to be having a great time discovering new channels and services, checking out a lot of great programming -- especially science and nature, films, news, new technology, etc. -- that in the end, we will likely settle in at around $49 a month for it all. That is about a third of the cost we were paying for our 250 channel cable TV package that gave us 235 channels that we never watched because it seemed that nothing was ever on when we went to the channels.

We have built a cluster of over 100 channels on the Roku that we do watch. We have so far found about 25 channels on the Apple TV 4. On the Amazon Fire TV we have found about 50 channels. Throw in network websites that we can use Google Chromecast to mirror to the TV screen (or that Apple and Android users can achieve using AirPlay or screen mirroring), and there seems so many great services that are now available outside the world of cable TV.

Another great advantage of cable cutting is that most of what you see are on-demand services, so the shows don't start until you get there and click on them. Showtime is up to you.

Cable cutting is a far different world that what you get with cable TV. It isn't for everybody but for us, we are thoroughly impressed and are having a great time saving about $1,000 a year.

#cablecutting

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