[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I use Urban, and I'm happy with that, so I can't really suggest an alternative. I do know, however, that one can attach a sattelite dish on one's roof, in a place where it won't be visible from the street, so I wouldn't rule the dish out.Does anyone in West Philly have any suggestions for alternatives to Urban Cableworks? We currently have service through them on 3 sets, at $13.50/mo (this is an unadvertised rate) which gives us only a very few channels (ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, DUTV, shopping channels and some other junk). With the political season in high gear, my husband would like to be able to see CSPAN and some of the other cable channels, but moving up to this level of service with Urban Cableworks would be $53.95 per month for a single set, which strikes us as ridiculously expensive.
Can anyone suggest any alternatives? We'd rather not put a dish on the front of our house...
But, since I'm a tad evangelical on the subject, I would recommend getting a TiVo on general principles. I've had one for about six or seven months now, and Goshamighty, I love it.
TiVo is basically a hard drive that records TV shows; the basic unit holds up to 40 hours, depending on the quality of the recording. This lets you play shows while recording another, pause and rewind live TV, and lotsa other Neat Things. Recording shows is easy: TiVo downloads the schedules, so all you do it enter the show titles, and it'll get as many of those as you need or want. You can set up "wishlists" to grab programs with particular performers: if you wanted to record anything Paul Newman was in, or that Alfred Hitchcock directed, or any show with the word "wood" in the description, you could do that. It's pretty slick.
I got the thing because I wanted to catch all the home repair and woodworking shows, which seemed to turn up at odd hours when I was channel-surfing-- and wouldn't ya know it, TiVo's ads in _This Old House_ magazine use this very example. It really makes television more worthwhile: rather than see what happens to be on, I look at what TiVo's trawled out of the river of TV flowing past my house, and I'll probably get more out of it. And, there's no worries about cueing up videotapes or timing the scheduler right.
Only drawback on the CSPAN stuff is that CSPAN doesn't give a lot of its scheduling info to the TiVo service, so it's difficult to program that stuff into the TiVo. But our house gives _The Daily Show_ highest priority for the TiVo, so we stay informed, somehow.
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