watching internet tv on tv - attn Lonnie

[mnhermit]

A while back in another thread (no I don't remember which one), Lonnie mentioned 'throwing' stuff from his computer onto his TV and watching it. I know Doug does this by using his computer as the 'tuner', but I'm looking for something that works like the Roku Box where a non-computer literate person (80ish parents) could watch/search/schedule youtube, or hulu, or any video from the web and watch it on the tv.

I've looked at the Chromecast dongle, but I think that requires Chrome as the browser and I haven't found any thing that describes the actual process to watch, just stuff that says its 'easy'.

I'd prefer something that didn't require a monthly fee (like Tivo does). However I found that I'm enjoying paying for Netflix through my Roku, but that doesn't satisfy all the criteria I have. And I'm not yet willing to pay for HuluPlus to get the other side.

Does anyone have any first hand experience with Apple TV?

Any advice, insight, suggestions would be appreciated - thanks.

[TKennedy]

I've had an Apple TV for several years. It's great. I use it mostly for movies and made for TV series. The selection for streaming Netflix is far inferior to the stuff you can get by mail. iTune movie selection is pretty good.

You can also stream YouTube stuff through your TV and virtually anything that you watch/listen to on your iPhone like streaming radio.

I'll be using it to watch House Of Cards season 2 soon

[aquaduct]

When we moved into our apartment at the beginning of the year we chose to go without cable. It's part of a growing trend out there that's gradually killing cable companies as more and more people just get content from the internet. Both of our kids have never bought cable (or Dish or whatever) and just pull shows they like to watch from Netflix. They simply don't do live TV and in my recollection, never have even when they were living with us.

My daughter got us a Roku 3 for Christmas so we've got that set up. It's great so far. The only thing we really watch on it is Netflix. We tried Huluplus and didn't find that they had much that we liked so we dumped it. The great thing about Netflix is you can turn it on and it will continue to stream seasons of shows until you're done. Most of our TV watching is as background noise anyways so this is cool. Other channels like A&E make you find an episode, play it, go back and find another episode, reload and play it, etc. That is really damn annoying if the show is something like Storage Wars where the half hour episode without commercials works out to reloading an episode every 21 minutes. And most all of those free channels only allow for a select few episodes which is pretty limiting.

The only drawback we see is that there's no way to get live TV broadcasts. Things like news shows and sports are out. You can usually find news shows like CBS Sunday Morning on the free CBS channel but only as a couple 4-minute clips. Nothing like the actual show.

And sports is a big pisser. We love baseball and follow the Nats and like to watch the games but I can't get them on the internet. I could subscribe to MLBtv and get something like 3500 baseball games a season but the blackout resrictions mean I can't ever watch a home team Nats game (or Orioles). Just what I need, a pay service that lets me watch everything except my hometown team.

Fox actually streamed the Superbowl for free over the internet and we got a Chromecast for the occasion. It was cheap and what the hell. The issues became that you need Chrome as a browser. It's all very easy to set up and run but it ties up a computer to make it go (Roku doesn't). Just bring up the page in Chrome, hit the little Chromecast icon to send that page to the device and you're good. But on something like an Android tablet the Chromecast becomes an app which is much more limiting, more like a downscale Roku that has you hooking up to a limited set of other apps instead of broadcasting a webpage. And for us all the involvement of extra computers, etc. means that the Chromecast is substantially inferior to the Roku in terms of broadcast quality with a lot of stuttering, etc. For the Superbowl we ended up just hooking our son's laptop up with an HDMI cable directly to our TV. Still, Chromecast is cheap and probably useful going forward for things outside the Roku world so we'll keep it.

I'm convinced that internet TV is the wave of the future. As soon as networks realize (like Fox did) that there's still a bunch of ad revenue available for streaming content outside of the cable/dish delivery constraints they'll eventually exploit it. Baseball definitely should rethink this whole TV licensing thing. If the only way to watch a game is to have cable and more and more people are dumping it and the high cost and spectacularly lousy service (Comcast here- virtually a legend in how not to treat customers) something will have to change.

But for right now, no sports, no news, and the really odd bit about having to actually think about what you want to watch and actively choose it. That's really kind of been an adjustment for a kid who's grown up with the TV always on.

[PaulKay]

There are two ways I do it.
1) XBox can open a browser to the internet and the TV is the main display. Nice thing about that is that XBox has great High Def.

2) Blu-Ray player with wireless connectivity. I wirelessly get to the internet and stream movies to the screen. VUDU, Netflix, HULU, etc are all available.

[coachdoc]

Feb 12, 2014 8:43:56 GMT -5 TKennedy said:

I've had an Apple TV for several years. It's great. I use it mostly for movies and made for TV series. The selection for streaming Netflix is far inferior to the stuff you can get by mail. iTune movie selection is pretty good.

You can also stream YouTube stuff through your TV and virtually anything that you watch/listen to on your iPhone like streaming radio.

I'll be using it to watch House Of Cards season 2 soon

Nice, but what are the hardware components? A Macbook and an HDMI cable? Is there such a thing as an HDMI switcher for 3-4 connections into the TV? I have DishTV as there is no cable where I live, and my DVR takes up the second (last) HDMI input. I like the sound of iTune streaming TV and/or downloads, but don't have a HDMI input available right now.

[TKennedy]

You need an HDMI port on the TV and a wireless network. I have an AirPort Extreme and an iMac . You'd probably have to check the Apple site for compatabiity with other setups. I'm not sure about that.

I really like how you can stream stuff to your TV right off your phone or iPad.

If you are all Apple it's a pretty sweet setup. The controller is an iPhone app but there is a hand held controller too.

[Doug]

www.free-tv-video-online.me/internet

Will get you about any broadcast show one day late. 

liveball.tv/

Will get you most sporting events.  I watched the Superbowl with UK announcers. 

Hulu still works for some stuff.

Many of the networks have their live stuff up either after the broadcast or a day late or in some cases a season late.

I get most of what we watch from the first one. 
PCs are cheap and you don't need a high powered one for TV the TV computer here is a Vista machine with 2 gig of ram.
If you use the PC for the TV I do recommend wireless mouse and KB.
Project Free TV taps into a bunch of storage sites that are only open to those who upload. (gorillavid, putlocker, vidbux etc)

Zero reason to pay cable bills. 

[patrick]

Feb 12, 2014 8:50:00 GMT -5 aquaduct said:

My daughter got us a Roku 3 for Christmas so we've got that set up. It's great so far. The only thing we really watch on it is Netflix. We tried Huluplus and didn't find that they had much that we liked so we dumped it. The great thing about Netflix is you can turn it on and it will continue to stream seasons of shows until you're done.

.....
Fox actually streamed the Superbowl for free over the internet and we got a Chromecast for the occasion. It was cheap and what the hell. The issues became that you need Chrome as a browser. It's all very easy to set up and run but it ties up a computer to make it go (Roku doesn't). Just bring up the page in Chrome, hit the little Chromecast icon to send that page to the device and you're good. But on something like an Android tablet the Chromecast becomes an app which is much more limiting, more like a downscale Roku that has you hooking up to a limited set of other apps instead of broadcasting a webpage. And for us all the involvement of extra computers, etc. means that the Chromecast is substantially inferior to the Roku in terms of broadcast quality with a lot of stuttering, etc. For the Superbowl we ended up just hooking our son's laptop up with an HDMI cable directly to our TV. Still, Chromecast is cheap and probably useful going forward for things outside the Roku world so we'll keep it.

I agree. We have a Roku 3 and Chromecast. With the Chromecast, if you use specific apps on your ipad or phone, the CC goes directly to the web page and sets up its own stream. Good for Youtube, but limited otherwise. You can cast anything you can play in a Chrome tab, but that relies on the processor speed of your computer.

On Roku, you can get a number of apps specific to various channels, e.g., Netflix, PBS, History Channel, etc. And if you buy an app called Plex, it will play any media you have on a home hard drive through Roku.

[jdd2]

One plus to chromecast is that it's always on. When switching to apple TV that little box takes over a minute, probably two, to get booted up and going.

Chromecast works with anything device that will run the chrome browser or chromecast app. But to throw something from your device to apple TV requires a device that will run Airplay, which means your device has to be about two years old or younger. (And I will not be replacing this 3-1/2 yr old macbook pro for another couple of years. So I use a recent ipad.) You can still use apple TV, but the Airplay aspect of it requires a newer device.

Another apple TV irritation is that I've yet to successfully "pair" the separate hand-held remote with the apple TV unit so that the remote does not affect other units. For example, to the left of the TV there is an ipod dock that has an ipod touch in it that generally stays there. When using the remote for the TV, you can see the ipod touch switching around, trying to follow those signals.

The hand-held apple TV remote also affects this laptop. When watching something on TV, I like to browse the net at the same time, either in general, or for something specific about what's on (reviews, actor bio, etc.). Using the remote next to the laptop, it keeps calling up itunes. Annoying. I've paired the remote with the apple TV unit, but haven't been able to de-pair it with a couple other apple devices so that it doesn't interfere with them.

Our TV is new, only about two months old, and apart from the chromecast dongle and apple TV, it has wireless built in. It's a sony (W900) so it's probably made so that it'd work well with a playstation.

[mccoyblues]

I have a Roku player and I have yet to find anything of value on it that you don't have to pay extra for. The whole point of streaming video is to reduce costs and I see nothing in this player that saves me money. I can't even stream old episodes of the Andy Griffith show without paying a fee?

What am I doing wrong?

[Deleted]

I have a Roku player and a roof mount antenna. We use Amazon Prime for movies as it seems to offer a better selection than Netflix, to our tastes, and we use the Prime shipping deal ("free" second day delivery on many items) often. HuluPlus for TV and movies. Hulu has almost the complete Criterion Collection, so if you like classic films and art house stuff, it's there in quantity.

We had DirectTV and dropped it last year. We just weren't watching much at all, and it seemed like a needless expenditure. I used the existing bracket and coaxial cable to connect an antenna. We get all the local channels, sports, etc. in HD.

We were paying about $140 a month for DirectTV. The antenna was a one time cost of $50, and the total monthly for both Amazon and Hulu is just under $20.

So, while not "free", we are saving about $120 a month, and enjoy our current set-up as much or more than the DirectTV package we had.

[mnhermit]

Thank you all for your insights.