How TV Should be Viewed

It wasn't more than a year ago when I was a TIVO fan girl. We were given an out of date TIVO in 2003, and I fell in love. With cable or dish network we could simply record only shows that we wanted to watch, and we were able to skip past commercials with the click of a button. We never watched broadcast TV again, it was always TIVO'ed tv. It hurt to visit people who had yet to experience TIVO, to be forced to watch commercials and to sit through hours of TV that didn't interest anyone. It turns out people watch a very small percentage of the Television that they pay for. As a TIVO viewer, I was spending less time watching only the shows that I wanted to watch and nothing more.

About a year ago, after Hulu began to add much more content, and Netflix offered an increasingly improved selection of movies to stream, we decided to make a huge change. We said goodbye to TIVO. It was hard, he was a good friend for a long time. But we were upgrading. We canceled our 60 some dollar a month dish plan and ordered a Mac Mini. It was $499.00, a lot all at once, but I knew that after a few months of not paying for dish network, it would pay for itself and it has.

The tiny, silent Mac replaced our huge stack of Media equipment and a huge library of DVD's. We said goodbye to our TIVO, our Dish receiver and our DVD player. Dish tried to convince us that streamed television is out of date, but we had just finished watching an episode of Chuck, streamed straight off NBC's website, an entire week before it was broadcast on regular TV, so we knew they were full of HOOEY!




I have an enormous selection of media, and it's only media that I am interested in. I can avoid the horrors of Reality Television and watch complete series from beginning to end. I no longer pay huge fees for TV I don't watch. With the exception of a 10.00 Netflix account and a few short commercials on Hulu, we have a much cheaper, better quality, arrangement for media. I love it.

Here is a really quick overview of PLEX the free, open source, media software that we have finally settled on.



This is just the media player... We also enjoy using our TV to access our favorite websites and games as well. Ainsley is playing on her Club Penguin account now. And with the giant computer screen in the living room, they can't get into anything without us knowing about it. It's simply awesome!

As for ease of use, Plex is simple and we don't have to leave it to access media. We use the system as a computer, and if you can navigate a few software programs you can use this set up. Nic turns on his cartoons all by himself in the morning, and he's even shown me how to do a few things in Plex. I guess, if you have a 5 year old to help you, you should be able to figure it out. :)