It’s been about six months with our current home entertainment setup and things are going pretty well. I’ve made a few minor enhancements, but nothing major. The most significant is the addition of an external hard drive to each of the ViP 211k receivers in the bedroom and living room. Plug in the hard drive, quick call to Dish, a one-time $40 charge, and bada-bang, bada-bing, instant DVR. Found a great deal on refurbished WD 1TB drives for $40 each, so for $120 I have a DVR for every TV.
The other addition is in the bedroom. I added an Apple Component AV Cable which allows us to plug in one of the iPhones or the iPod Touch and stream Netflix. That gives us Netflix on every TV.
Unfortunately, it’s not all bunnies and rainbows. From the beginning of this whole exercise I knew that the big sacrifice was going to be live sports, specifically racing. I’m not talking about NASCAR. I’m interested in ALMS, Indycar, and F1. Those viewing options have actually gotten even worse than when I started.
F1 is broadcast in the US on Speed and I’m not willing to pay for the next Dish programming tier to get it. There’s no legal F1 streaming source. No real change since last year for F1.
Indycar used to stream all practices, qualifying, and races live, but the network overlords pulled the plug on that this year. I’d have to bump up two Dish programming tiers to get Versus. Not gonna happen.
The only improvement, and it is a mixed blessing, is that ALMS is streamed live on espn3.com with no live TV broadcast. I currently have access to espn3.com, but the video quality varies from okay to poor. Thanks for nothing.
If I am desperate for Indycar or F1, I can connect to a friend’s Slingbox and leech off of his cable subscription. That is assuming he isn’t watching his own TV and that I can tolerate the really poor picture quality. Really poor.
So, if you take live sports out of the equation then we’re really happy with the current setup. It’s significantly cheaper than our old full cable setup and we have more programming options. Except for my racing.