losing cable? need sports.

i want to ditch my cable. i can watch everything i want on ps3/roku and antenna for local news/football.

but i am having a hard time finding a viable option to stream NBA games. I was looking into the league pass, but i'd be blacked out due to being local to my team. so the leagues and the cable companies are in bed with each other, and i could only stream my team if i lived out of town.

i understand there are not so legal stream sites, but they are not so legal(don't care) and the quality usually sucks. plus i don't want to watch on my computer.

am i stuck with my stupid cable company, or are there better options? my house is surrounded by large trees so i think one of the dishes won't work here. not that they cost any less than cable.

Not sure if NBA has something like gamecenter... I'm planning on getting NHL gamecenter this year so I can watch games in my bedroom and not just the living room.

e46potenza wrote: Not sure if NBA has something like gamecenter... I'm planning on getting NHL gamecenter this year so I can watch games in my bedroom and not just the living room.

Local games might be blacked out, FYI.

For me, the solution was to watch it at a friends house, go to a bar ($3 pitchers means I can stay a long time for cheap), or stream it online.

mtn wrote:

e46potenza wrote: Not sure if NBA has something like gamecenter... I'm planning on getting NHL gamecenter this year so I can watch games in my bedroom and not just the living room.

Local games might be blacked out, FYI. For me, the solution was to watch it at a friends house, go to a bar ($3 pitchers means I can stay a long time for cheap), or stream it online.

And with no cable bill to pay, you can afford to do this more often, with more pitchers

I do wish that SWMBO would hate the cable bill as much as I do

Pat, check you PM box.

I do torrents + home theater PC. Of course that means you don't get to watch the game until after it's finished though.

The only time I really miss having TV is during football season. I have zero desire to watch a replay of a game that's already happened. For other programs I'm ok with a day delay or so. Right now that's how I watch the Daily Show - streamed off the Comedy Central site a day or so later. I don't mind the comercials between the segments.

I have some friends who ditched cable and use some probably illegal funky streaming system. Apparerntly it's ripe for virus attacks so they have an old Mac laptop set up only for doing this, transfering the video signal to one of their TV's. They're both computer nerds and enjoy playing with this stuff. I don't have the patience. Regardless, I went to their house for the Superbowl last year and it worked well enough to watch the game with minimal glitches.

It'll definitely be interesting to see what the various leagues do when their current cable and satellite contracts are done. As a serious question: how much would you be willing to pay for streaming access to live broadcasts? With commercials? Without?

I'd pay at least Netflix/Hulu/iTunes subscription prices for ala carte options from the cable co. More to be commercial free, of course. Honestly the commercials don't really bother me, it's that we watch maybe 10% of the channels that are in our tier. SWMBO and I were talking again last night about ditching the cable. It'll save us $90/mo and encourage us to be more interactive as a family. We've spent several nights recently watching movies or listening to music - no real TV, and it's been pretty nice.

Sports are a huge hole in the streaming market right now (at least in the US, I believe in other parts of the world it is better). So either live with whatever you can find already in place online, watch at your local sportsbar/friend's house or go without.

The cable companies know this and since they hold the keys to the kingdom they'll hold onto them for all they are worth so I suspect that the contracts will be renewed with additions for some delayed or partial streaming options for the various sports, but nothing that would allow you to get what you have now without having an expensive cable package.

Ultimately they will price themselves out of the market to some extent as people are slowly moving away from large cable packages as they are tightening their belts or getting tired of sitting around watching not much of anything.

Just dropped the TV and home phone portion of our FIOS package, and then found that we could get local channels and HBO along with the high speed internet (50/50) for about $70 a month from FIOS (which cuts off about $130 a month from the bill). Did the swap, use Netfix and Amazon for most TV watching, as well as HBO GO. And it turns out, we get a few more than the local channels, as SyFy, Velocity, and Discovery are still coming in, but who knows how much longer that'll last. Hmm.

Anyhow, we don't miss the hundreds of TV channels we never watched anyhow. My only concern is with racing on ESPN and sports that were only there.

ESPN app and sync it with friends/families cable co. acct.

In reply to turboswede:

I'm hopeful, but I fear you're right.

Right now, all I have is an ancient CRT TV that I haven't turned on in two years. The only reason I still have it is it sits in my entertainment center that also houses my stereo - which does get used every day. But eventually I want to get a HD flatscreen for watching movies and whatnot. Still debating on getting cable* again. I haven't had it at my house in over 10 years, although the ex- has it, so I watched it there.

(* = satelitte being the same thing for ease of typing)

Ian F wrote: In reply to turboswede: I'm hopeful, but I fear you're right. Right now, all I have is an ancient CRT TV that I haven't turned on in two years. The only reason I still have it is it sits in my entertainment center that also houses my stereo - which does get used every day. But eventually I want to get a HD flatscreen for watching movies and whatnot. Still debating on getting cable* again. I haven't had it at my house in over 10 years, although the ex- has it, so I watched it there. (* = satelitte being the same thing for ease of typing)

Yup. Look at the absolute E36 M3 show that was the Olympics on NBC. We wanted to watch the opening ceremony. Think we could do that online? Nope. I was okay with them controlling who could watch the actual events, that's fine really. They paid good money for the rights to that. However, why couldn't I watch the damned opening ceremony in real time?

The only thing I really watch is whatever shows we can find on Hulu, PBS or Youtube along with cheap DVD's bought at Target. I'm still able to keep up with many of the sportscar racing series I like, if not a bit delayed. Dont' particularly care for F1 or Indy anymore. Miss V8 Supercars, but I can always buck up and pay for that if I choose. Same with Hulu which has Hulu Plus for cheap, but trying to reduce costs where we can. Luckily there's ton of neat documentaries on Youtube and PBS online that I prefer to watch and there's enough junkfood for the mind on Hulu to keep the wifey happy without paying extra for it.

Things like the olympics or the superbowl* are holes that aren't easy to deal with unless we pay the money to watch it at a bar or at a friend's house. So that's a choice to be made as to how important it is to us.

*=social event, don't care about the game really.

back from hibernation.

football is fine, i'm 20 miles from cleveland and get nbc/fox/cbs/abc over the air.

i love baseball but prefer radio for it while i do other things.

basketball is my hangup. the league pass is $100. i'd gladly pay that IF i could get my Cavs games. but i'm in market so no dice. hell i'd pay $150, as it would still cost a crapton less than the 8 months that is NBA season.

how's the chromecast versus roku?

I had a Roku, then got a Chromecast for Christmas. I like the Roku better, mainly because we have the top model that is hard wired and I'm used to it. The Chromecast is cool in that you can stream from just about anything, but the resolution wasn't so great on our network. We also have several different devices that stream and the Chromecast was redundant. For $30, if you don't have anything else that streams (blu ray, game console, etc), its a good device.

what about roku versus ps3 then? we already have netflix and amazon video on ps3. it's pretty sweet

My TV has wireless built in and native apps for Netflix and Hulu Plus. I plug the MacBook in via HDMI to stream F1 and Premier League (log in to NBC Sports Live with friend's info).

Really the only thing I can't get at the moment is football. I wish that there was an app built into the TV for NHL Gamecenter. I use the ESPN app through Xbox One but it sometimes tells me "This Service Isn't Included In Your Cable Package". I've not been able to figure out what triggers it. It let me watch all the FIFA World Cup games, but won't let me watch Monday Night Football (for example). I'm hoping I can watch the Pirates-Giants game tomorrow night, but not getting my hopes up.

In reply to LainfordExpress:

Anything that is ESPN or ESPN2 programming requires you to sync the app with a providers account to prove you pay for ESPN. If you can get a friends cable/satellite online account login info you can get access to that stuff.

patgizz wrote: what about roku versus ps3 then? we already have netflix and amazon video on ps3. it's pretty sweet

Roku has the option of adding a ton of channels, some free, some paid. Some worth it, many not. Roku.com will let you check out what channels are available. There's a forum too. If you only want Netflix/Hulu/Amazon then I would stick with PS3.