Drunkard's Walk Forums

My father's looking at dropping cable and going to "rabbit ears" for local TV and streaming or pre-downloaded video for everything else. What should he be looking at in the way of set-top boxes? (Apparently, it seems TiVO wants a monthly fee nowadays... What else is out there?)

My father can use a soldering iron and write code ... but my mother needs something easy to use.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

I have a friend who has a device from Roku. I know Apple makes AppleTV. I believe Amazon also has a set-top box that ties into their own video offers. Netflix may also have something. The closest you might get outside of those is a Raspberry Pi or similar small-form computer loaded with Linux Mint and XBMC/Kodi. That latter will work with a USB dongled IR remote meant for Windows, we have a full-blown XBMC tower computer here, and a Windows Media Center dongled remote that works perfectly well with it.

Note that most modern HDTV sets are "smart" devices, and will let you stream directly without additional hardware, but the range of online services/providers may be limited.

The greatest difficulty here is that the "easy to use" pretty much mandates some sort of monthly/yearly subscription to a service, unless you father looks to doing a lot of setup legwork. However, I do believe most of the solutions are now "stream on demand" instead of "record now, watch later", although you can still with some effort set such a thing up for over-the-air if you really need to.

And for the record, most of what I know of the streaming side comes from Myk-El's real life prototype, who cut the cord something like 3 years ago and hasn't looked back.
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"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor