As part of my partial boycott of Rogers, we don’t get Cable. TV is pretty expensive for something that is easily replaced by DVDs, torrents or gaming. We can get a lot of other entertainment that supports time-shifting for the $50/month that we would have to pay for digital cable (and box, and pvr etc etc).
But, it’s nice to have TV sometimes, to watch the news (isn’t there something happening in Mumbai?) or Smallville (wait no, I’m officially weened off the series, I haven’t seen one episode from Season 8. It was bye Lana, bye Luthor and bye Kevin). So our solution was to buy an antenna for our TV (since it already has a ATSC tuner).
Getting a pair of rabbit ears is a bit odd to go with cutting edge HDTVs, but it does work. And not only with the analog channels of old, but with 1080i digital channels. I ordered an antenna from Dell back on September 26, and it finally got delivered on Friday. A good two months later (I seem to have some trouble with order delays). We can get City, Global, CTV, CBC and a couple of Buffalo stations all in HDTV.
It’s not the perfect solution (although it was cheap, ~$40 which is less than one month of cable); because our suite faces NE, I can’t get a line of sight to the CN Tower (or Buffalo for that matter) so the signal strength varies a bit. Unlike analog, when the signal drops to low, the picture just doesn’t update anymore!
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