Over the past year or so I have been making baby steps toward “cutting the cord”, which in my case means maybe some day discontinuing service from DirecTV. (For others, “cord cutting” might mean discontinuing television service from Comcast or Dish or Time-Warner.) In past blog articles I have written about the best media stick to use when traveling and over-the-top service from HBO. For my household it was a big step to drop the HBO service from DirecTV and to use HBO Now instead.
But there is a category of television reception that I have found to be harder to tackle, namely the reception of “local” network broadcast stations. Where I live in the mountains of Colorado there are precisely no broadcast television stations. For many, many years my household has been paying DirecTV to provide “local” television stations, by which I mean the Denver television stations. I can’t receive the Denver stations at my home, because a mountain range blocks the signal. Some of my neighbors pay Comcast cable to provide those same “local” television stations to them. The point is that a would-be cord-cutter who lives in a place with few or no broadcast television signals faces the question what to do about picking up network broadcast stations.
The usual cord-cutting approach for most households is to use an antenna to receive over-the-air television signals. But as I say, that approach doesn’t work where I live in the mountains of Colorado. I’ve stumbled upon a new approach that may finally permit discontinuing all DirecTV service. Continue reading “Baby steps toward cord-cutting”
