Cable Freedom Is a Click Away

Welcome to our living room. Take a seat, make yourself comfortable. Would you like to watch a movie, or the new “Family Guy” episode?

Evan Sung for The New York Times
Devices that fell short of providing the best TV viewing experience and program options lie discarded in the living room of Nick and Danielle Bilton. More Photos »
Oh, that, over there. You want to know why there’s a pile of gadgets and wires on the floor? My wife and I usually don’t talk about that clutter. We actually refer to it as the Gadget Graveyard. Mostly, we pretend it doesn’t even exist. But since you asked, I’ll explain.

This digital necropolis isn’t your typical sanctuary for retired devices. Instead, here you’ll find technologies that tried to provide the best viewing experience and program options with a television, but ultimately fell short. Everything is relatively new, and comparatively unusable — to me at least.

Among this pile you can find my old remote controls and wires from my cable box. Then there’s the dreaded Apple TV, now a $250 paperweight. There’s also the $80 Roku box, a device that allows you to stream video from Netflix, Amazon.com and other sites directly to your television. But wait, there’s more! A Vudu player, a Slingbox and a handful of other single-serving contraptions.

Those devices are all behind me now. I disconnected everything, threw it to the side and canceled the cable months ago. Instead, now I have a Mac Mini, wireless mouse and a Microsoft Xbox hooked up to my television.

This quest for cable freedom has been a couple of years in the works. Before I called the cable company to bid my farewell I imagined that I would need a vast array of devices to fill the entertainment void: a device for games, something for television shows, a contraption for streaming movies through Netflix and, finally, something to control all of the above. But it turns out a computer can do all those tasks with some software upgrades and a wireless keyboard and mouse.

I have to be honest, this isn’t as easy as just plugging a computer into a monitor, sitting back and watching a movie. There’s definitely a slight learning curve. One difficult part of this equation was getting used to the wireless mouse. We use a mouse called the Loop, made by Hillcrest Labs, that costs $99. The Loop looks more like a chocolate-frosted doughnut with buttons than something that navigates a television set. To navigate the screen you hold it out and wave your hand from side to side as if you are conducting an orchestra.

As for the computer, you don’t specifically need a Mac Mini. This set up can work with most inexpensive PCs; just make sure the video card can handle the streaming video requirements. Our refurbished Mac Mini cost $380 online.

Although the initial investment was costly, totaling $550, it took only a few months to recoup the money. Back in the olden days of cable we were forced to shell out a relatively standard $140 a month, for television service alone. This cost gave us access to a digital video recorder and hundreds of unwatched TV channels.

Contrast this with today, where our only expense is $9 a month to stream Netflix videos from the Web and the $30 a month that we always spent on an Internet connection. O.K., maybe that’s not completely accurate. When the wireless keyboard died a few weeks ago I was forced to spend another $4 for two new AA batteries. We’ve not yet recovered from that financial loss.

We still come home from work and watch any number of shows, just like the people who continue to pay for cable. We just do it a little differently, starting the computer and then using services like Hulu, Boxee, iTunes and Joost. Another interesting twist to this experience is that we’re no longer limited to consuming traditional programming. With these applications we can spend an entire evening flicking through videos from YouTube, CollegeHumor or Web-only programs.

Here are a few of the applications on our home setup:

Boxee is probably the most clicked icon on our television. You can download this free open-source application from Boxee.tv. It’s important to note that it’s still in test phase and a little rough around the pixels, but over all it allows you to access almost any type of video content online. You can easily stream CNN, Current TV, PBS and more. Most important for us, Boxee easily allows access to the Netflix streaming service, which offers up thousands of movies and television shows (just not always the most popular options).

Next there is Hulu Desktop, the joint venture among Fox, NBC, ABC and many other mainstream programming outlets. This service allows you to watch more than 1,700 television shows, including traditional favorites like “30 Rock,” “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Office.” Hulu’s downloadable desktop application, as opposed to hulu.com, works extremely well with large screens. Apple’s iTunes application replicates all the features of Apple TV, allowing you to buy or rent movies and listen to your music collection.

Be warned though that iTunes can get expensive. If you watch premium-cable television shows, you can pay more than $40 for the season of a single show. But even that is less than one month of cable. Since there are so many other entertainment options online, we just skip “Dexter” and “Weeds.” Trust me, there is a lot of great free or ad-supported content out there.

Finally there’s Joost.com. Although it’s not a downloadable application and only accessible through a Web browser, Joost offers free streaming movies and a strange variety of cartoons.

While Microsoft’s Xbox 360 (starting at $200), is not absolutely necessary for this setup, it delivers an array of lively entertainment options. I can, of course, play video games, but I can also rent movies (through the Xbox marketplace or through Netflix’s online viewing service), and browse Twitter and Facebook, with a new feature that lets you watch a streaming interface of your social networks flow across the screen.

I understand this kind of living room experience isn’t for everyone. It’s a lot less work to just click a button up or down on a standard remote control. And it can be difficult to explain how to use this unfamiliar toolbox of buttons, programs and devices.

Over Thanksgiving a friend graciously house-sat at our apartment. It took my wife more than an hour to write a detailed description explaining how to use our new TV setup. After explaining how to use the mouse and keyboard, we had to describe how to switch among applications. The instructions read:

“If you want to watch “Ugly Betty,” or “Saturday Night Live,” you will need to load up Hulu. If you’d like to watch some of the movies we’ve downloaded, you will have to quit Hulu, open up Boxee and navigate to the movies folder. To use Netflix, you’ll need to switch to the Xbox and. ... ” But after a few hours of randomly clicking into cyberspace, our friend figured it out.

There is one other showstopper. I know the sports and technology enthusiasts don’t often mix, but if you’re one of the few people who live in both of those worlds you might have to look for other options. To watch baseball you can buy a little dongle that plugs into the back of your computer and streams free over-the-air high-definition channels. I bought this for the Yankees games and it worked perfectly. If you’re an ESPN fan you have two options. Stick with cable, or go to a bar to watch the basketball games.

Over all, I couldn’t be happier with our computer television setup. Now, I just have to figure out what gadgets I’m going to buy with the $1,600 a year I no longer send to the cable company.

Dumping The TV Cable Box

I thought I embraced the future of television several years ago when we got our first TiVo. While that event was significant, it's now clear our DVR was only a technological painkiller to make tolerable the broken state of television: scheduled screenings with heavy commercial interruption. But things have come a long way since then.

To demonstrate how far and fast television has come, I turn to my own household. We're a good example because we're neither manic early adopters, nor laggards -- we're somewhere in the middle. We experienced extraordinary change over the past year, and it happened with only modest investment and simple upgrades.

- Our television now is high-definition, 52 inches widescreen, with digital surround sound.
- Verizon's FioS fiber-optic lines have replaced traditional coaxial cable lines into our home, and they connect to a high-definition cable-television receiver.
- Those fiber-optic lines enable much faster Internet connection speeds, making broadband video more meaningful than ever before.
- Sources of online video are getting serious, and high-definition video quality is becoming more prevalent. There's BitTorrent, of course, but also more legal and mainstream sources, including Netflix, Amazon and Hulu.
- Our television system plugs into our cable box, but also a dedicated laptop (with Blu-ray DVD) and several other devices. One awesome device is a Roku, a digital video player that instantly streams high quality movies and network television series from Netflix (and soon from Amazon Video On Demand).
- With a dedicated laptop for our television system, services like Boxee make online video social and optimized for widescreen. This helps us discover the best content, display it properly and filter things we don't want.
Indeed, these technologies prompted significant behavioral shifts and media configuration choices. Here are the big ones in our household:

Firing The Cable Company Becomes A Sport

It used to be that the traditional cable company was the only television content and Internet pipeline into our home. But now there's a better choice, and it's creating downward pressure on prices, and upward pressure on product selection, quality and service. While a duopoly is not ideal, it's much better than a monopoly. And I certainly enjoyed firing our traditional cable company. So did our neighbors.

Decline Of Casual, Commercial-Interrupted Viewing

Casual, commercial-interrupted television viewing is almost gone, unless it's a quick clip on a laptop. There are several reasons: First, today's steroid-injected media systems don't lend themselves to casual viewing. Richer programming, huge vivid pictures and surround sound means that our television room has turned into a theater. Therefore, it becomes difficult to do anything but focus fully on the programming. Similarly, commercial interruptions become more intense and difficult to ignore, which means they become more bothersome.

Second, the paradox of technology is that television systems have gotten overly complex. With numerous devices, configurations and programming sources, it takes more planning, commitment and work to view. That complexity has led my family to be more selective and gravitate toward more meaningful programming with higher expectations and focus.

One Theater Versus Multiple TVs

In our house, we've never had more than one or two televisions. But as televisions evolve into mini theaters, the complexity and cost inherent in a good system makes it impractical to have multiple television configurations. Certainly, there will be more video screens, evident on mobile devices and laptops, used primarily for short-form viewing. But for long-form television viewing, we certainly don't want to downgrade from a theater experience to a lighter, less-satisfying one. Switching back and forth is unpleasant.

Thirst For High-Definition Content Growing
Once you get used to high-definition video, anything less is painful to endure. As a result, we sometimes select programming we'd otherwise disregard -- because it was high-def and the alternative wasn't. We long for the day when all programming will meet a minimum threshold of high-def.

Dumping The Cable Box

Most significant, we're almost ready to dump the cable box, which delivers traditional broadcast channels and network programming. The combination of better broadband, plug-and-play devices (like Roku) and serious online video streaming has made a big dent in our traditional cable-box viewing. Sports and other live events are still tied to cable boxes, and therefore will remain among the few significant incentives to keep traditional cable programming over the next couple years. But I underscore that the only time my family really used our cable box in 2009 was to tune into the Super Bowl. In one year, when our FioS subscriber agreement ends, we plan to cancel cable programming, unless it's a bundled giveaway.

To be sure, television and video content will continue to evolve quickly. Our personal media habits and technology configurations, described above, will outdate quickly. What will be the new television experience? I'm not sure, but I anticipate it will keep getting better. And I hope it simplifies.

How is television changing for you?