I have been seeing more and more people I know asking about cord cutting, and your local channels. I think their first goal is to save money, and secondly they are tired of contracts. Finally, you may be tired of paying for channels you simply don’t watch. If you are like me, you don’t mind paying a fair price for services you actually use.
Although I like to save money just like the next person, I am not going to attempt to gain access to something that I don’t pay for. There are many services out there available for streaming. I’m not going to go into much detail in this post regarding that. I will cover some of my experiences and lessons learned in a future blog post regarding streaming services.
Streaming Services and Local Channels
I have tried Playstation Vue in the past, and really liked it. I then switched to what was DirecTV Now. That service had a nice channel selection as well as local channels. However, they had a major lineup revision and price increase, so I dropped it. I moved on to Hulu Live TV. All of these offered most of my local television stations.
I have tried a trial with Sling, and like the interface and channel selection. However, it lacked local channels in my area. That was a show stopper for me. I spent a lot of time researching what my options were regarding local channels. I was really enjoying the flexibility of being able to switch services without a contract. But I was limited because local channels were very important to me.
By this time in my cord cutting journey, I had a significant investment in Amazon Fire TV sticks, and liked their interface. I was looking at the Fire TV Recast, but the price point was a little more than I wanted to put into it. The features and functionality of it were very attractive though. I really liked the idea of being able to connect it and have at least two Fire TV Recasts playing my local television stations.
Another attractive feature for me was the limited internet bandwidth at my home. We are stuck with 10 Mbps, so once we start watching multiple devices, the streaming performance starts to suffer. I have a nice home wireless router, so local connectivity was not an issue. However, the router cannot substitute for poor internet speed.
Fire TV Recast
I was looking on Amazon one day and noticed there was a nice deal on the Fire TV Recasts. The model I selected was the 500 GB, 2 tuner model. I tried a few antennas that I mounted in my attic. I had to drill an access hole in a header from my attic to feed the coax cable through. A brush plate and low voltage old work box were used in my wall to neatly feed the cabling through.
There were issues with signal strength on some of my channels, mainly FOX that airs my Carolina Panthers games. I had to get this issue corrected ASAP. I purchased an OTA antenna amplifier and it helped resolve this issue for the most part. It needs to be mounted as close to your antenna as possible if you decide to use one.
The Fire TV Recast integrated nicely with my Firestick TV interface. You can go to the “Live” tab, and your local channels are integrated right into the menu. You have to perform a channel scan to get your channels discovered. I was pleasantly surprised with how many channels we had available just from adding this feature.
Cord Cutting and Local Channels Summary
Although the initial cost of getting the local channels was a little more than I wanted to spend, it gave me some redundancy if there was a loss of internet during a storm. Although having internet access allows you to see a tile of the local stations, it isn’t necessary to have. You go to the “DVR” in the menu and can scroll through the channels.
When it comes to cord cutting and your local channels, you have several options available. If you don’t mind spending a little more money up front for a Fire TV Recast, it really opens up your options for streaming providers. If you simply just want a one stop shop for all of your content, providers such as Hulu Live TV or YouTube TV have a nice selection of local channels. They are available in many markets, so it’s worth checking out.
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