One of our recurring monthly cost has been the satellite TV service period every time we turn around we are faced with a bill that is ever increasing the most pitiful customer service on the planet just barely behind AT&T and Comcast.
We find that we are streaming most but not all of our media excluding certain local over-the-air channels.
The time getting record and freeing ourselves from that bill is overdue. We have a challenge though as power main TV in the living room is an older Sony 37 inch CRT. It's a great bomb-proof TV but it is anything but digital.
So we needed to adapt..
Some online shopping and research on the reviews of the various over the air digital antenna choices let us to a Groupon for a Polaroid built Yagi beam Style antenna with a rotator and remote.
The base of the antenna should be the same as the existing DirecTV satellite dish the plan is to Simply disconnect the DirecTV dish remove it and swap in the yagi beam antenna.
The Direct TV swim devices work at a different frequency than normal cable or broadcast TV signals so we have to replace the splitter amplifier , we found an excellent price on a 1 in 8 out Monoprice splitter amplifier at Walmart. So that issue is easily handled once we pull the DirecTV dish off swapped in the antenna we are simply going to swap the swim splitter for the Monoprice splitter. Then you should have appropriate signal through the house.
There is some additional coaxial work we are going to need for rooms that do not currently have a coax run to them most notably the new office / home studio does not happen as well as I want a line run to the garage.
So with the TV signal being distributed through coax to the whole house we now have to deal replacing the DVR function and compatibility with an analog television.
I happen to have an old one terabyte Spinning Disk hard drive leftover from when I upgraded my editing laptop to SSD. I ordered an inexpensive USB 2.0 to SATA 2.5 inch internal hard drive enclosure. It was a bargain and is from a well-known brand again from Walmart. This will provide storage for the digital to analog converter box with DVR.
From this device we can record live TV with double the storage capacity of the satellite DVR.
Lastly is we want an additional storage device for locally ripped and encoded media.
We are sick and tired of dealing with DVDs and there's a lot of media we like to watch frequently that is not available on any streaming service that we are aware of. Not to mention we have personal videos and the raw storage for our video work.
We have and Android streaming box that is connected to the smart TV that has multiple USB 2.0 we are researching compatibility with that right now but we believe the maximum Drive size compatible with it is 2 terabytes. We ordered a Western Digital 2 terabyte USB disk just for this purpose.
While it is costing a little bit up front through careful shopping we are keeping the cost down to around $300. With the ever creeping up of the cost of DirecTV that is 3 months worth of service so the break even point is very short again this will help us reign in our finances without sacrificing too much in the way of the services we have grown accustomed to.
Which brings me two of how this relates to woodworking it all. Like I mentioned above I want to run a coaxial line into the shop as I am seriously considering adding a small inexpensive Smart TV into the shop for streaming things like how to videos or watching the game in solitude.
However I am uncertain of what budget-friendly sets are available on the market now that are reasonably tolerant of the Heat humidity and dust that is prevalent in a workshop.
So I am reaching out to my followers and subscribers and ask you for your input what a good smart TV for Workshop use be? What are you using? And are you happy with the set you are using?
If possible I would like a set that features 802 11 AC Wireless connectivity. Might as well not have my smart TV be The Slowdown on my network.
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