THE MIKE KAUS

I absolutely hate Time Warner Cable.  There are several reasons for this, including: 1) TWC always raises rates for no reason whatsoever, 2) TWC wont carry the NFL Network, and 3) their service and product is sub-par.

Why not just switch to a different cable/satellite service?  Literally no other cable services exist where I live, and the forest behind my house blocks all satellite television service signals.  I’m stuck with TWC, and I hate them.

I decided to find a way to get out from under the burden that is TWC, and not go bored at the same time.  I’m proud to say, thanks to @Boxee + AppleTV + @ATVFlash, I’m livin’ the dream baby.

First, I got myself an AppleTV. This little box essentially puts iTunes on your TV.  Hence, you can watch all your videos in iTunes on your flat screen.  Very awesome. All of my videos that I have saved I can watch on the TV, any iTunes movies I rent I can watch on the TV, and any season passes I subscribe to via iTunes download automatically.  The money I send to Apple for the iTunes Videos I buy is waaaaay cheaper than the money I sent to TWC.  This is an excellent start.

Next, I purchased ATVFlash.  This is a hack for your AppleTV that brings it to the next level (and it is 100 percent reversible and doesn’t affect your AppleTV’s warrenty).  The 3 most important features for me: it unlocks the USB port of the Apple TV, it adds the Sapphire media browser to the start-up menu, and it adds Boxee to the start up menu.

The unlocked USB port of the Apple TV allows me add an external hard drive to the AppleTV. No more being limited to a small amount of GB or slow uploading!  I just toss my video files on the hard drive and plug it in.

The Sapphire media browser pulls information about each of my video files from IMDB.com.  So, instead of just seeing the name of the file, I get a picture of the show/movie, the title of the show/movie, and a brief summary of the episode/movie.  It makes for a great media browsing experience.

Finally, Boxee, is the icing on the cake.  Boxee is an internet television aggregator – that is it finds all the television shows on the internet and brings them all together for me to browse and watch.  All Hulu shows are in the TV library, and there are tons of applications for specific programming.  This is how I see all the shows on TV that I cycle through on a daily basis that I would normally watch during a weekday at primetime, or whenever.

To this setup I added an antenna, so I can watch live local channels.  That is truly free HD (hear that TWC???).

End Result: All the shows I like are right there, either on Boxee or my Apple TV.  They are all essentially DVRed, and I can stop at start them at my leisure with minimal (if any) commercials.

Only drawbacks: If you follow a sports team whose games play on cable, you won’t be able to watch them.  Examples are the NBA on TNT and Monday Night Football.  One of the Boxee apps is the MLB internet TV, so that takes care of your baseball viewing needs.  ESPN 360 also provides a lot of sports viewing.

Personally, I’ve been thrilled with this setup thus far.  Hopefully this helps any of you out there in the same predicament.