2011-02-25

Project Goodbye Mediacom

Project ‘Goodbye Mediacom’ is underway…

After having Mediacom’s cable TV service for a year, their teaser rate has ended and they want to charge $69/month for basic cable + $6/month for HD + $11/month for an DVR device.

You know what? I don’t want to pay ~$1,000/year for TV.

I’m paying them $45/month for Internet (12mb), so if I remove the TV that will go to $65/month (they will have there pound of flesh), but the key problem is paying for TV.

I don’t really like to watch TV, as there are lots of development work I’d rather be working on, so 1K/year is too much for something optional that I don’t like.

So the options are:

Over the air broadcast & Tivo
Over the air broadcast & home made PVR
No TV
Put up and Pay

The first two plans relied on if we could get an aerial that worked where we live, otherwise we ether had to put up with Mediacom or just have no TV… The house we are renting has a “no putting up aerials” rule, so it would have to be internal, and I didn’t have the option of putting it in the attic, as I wouldn’t be able to run the cable into the livingroom/office without plaster work, and I wasn’t going there ether.

When we first moved into the house we tried a small internal aerial, the and it basically didn't work [RCA ANT121](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00009W3E2), I could see that there was digital TV, but was always "bad"

So I went to best buy and picked up a more expensive internal aerial with amplifier, the [Trek FDTV2A](http://www.amazon.com/Terk-FDTV2A-Omni-Directional-Amplified-Digital/dp/B001VYQG16), which also didn't really work, there were three channels that were 80% but crackly, and the rest would never work for more than a few seconds. I tried it flat under the TV, vertical behind the TV, vertical on the wall, and held by hand. Flat worked best, but really wasn't good enough. I found the +10db amplifier didn't seem to help the signal quality, but I didn't do any empirical testing.

So I return that to [BestBuy](http://www.bestbuy.com/), and purchased the [Antennas Direct - ClearStream 2](http://www.amazon.com/Antennas-Direct-C2-CLEARSTREAM2-Antenna/dp/B0017O3UHI), this worked well in the living room pointing out the corner of the house (behind a chair) and in the office (the final project planned destination) I got 100% signal for 4 major channels and a total of 19 channels. I also also picket up a rocket-fish powered +4db amplifier/splitter, but my testing showed that across the 19 channels that it had a zero or non-positive effect. So I returned that.

I purchase these things directly from BestBuy at their +20% Amazon prices for the very reason of returning if they didn’t work. So in the end I was not stressed at the additional purchase price.

Now that I knew that Project ‘Goodbye Mediacom’ was viable, I started the planning for the DVR replacement.