Cutting the cord

When we came to the US, we thought we were here for just four months, so one of the things it didn't really make sense to do was to get a TV contract.  In fact we didn't even get a TV.  And it has been like that for well over a year.

We mostly watch on Hulu or BBC iPlayer. We sometimes buy a series from iTunes.  We get out the odd DVD from a RedBox just around the corner, and we go to the cinema more often than we used to - having three of them within walking distance does help with that.

The only thing we can't easily view is sports, though it's not the worst thing in the world to have to go to a bar to watch a big game.  I did miss the high-quality coverage of the Tour de France on ITV4, but we got reasonable online viewing (albeit a bit unreliable) from an All-Access Pass from MSNBC, and I missed Ned Boulting et al enough that I got quite into their daily podcast during the Tour.  And in any case, an 9-hour time difference was never going to make it easy to watch.

Cutting the cord would be a lot easier with a decent internet connection.  I had entertained fantasies that Silicon Valley would be a land of boundless bandwidth, but sadly it's a bit like rewinding 5 years or so, with added DNS failures, compared to London. (That's the benefit of local loop unbundling then.)  But even still, it works just about well enough.

We watch on an iPad if we're feeling lazy, and we bought a pico-projector for when we want the full-screen experience at home (it involves a little effort to plug it in and focus it, but we do get a 50" picture).

And the best thing?  It's a lot harder to just leave the TV on for "background noise" - an effect I'm definitely not missing at all!