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Recently I did something I'd been promising to do for a while: I cancelled my Time Warner cable TV service. I'd been thinking about it for a long time, finally came to the conclusion that while I do really like TV, I just wasn't watching enough of it anymore to justify the $100 I was spending for cable each month (I subscribed to the basic service plus HD channels and also paid a monthly fee to rent an HD-DVR).

Like a lot of other people who have cut the cord, I've turned to the internet -- Hulu and Netflix make that easier than ever -- but since I still wanted to be able to watch live TV now and again I picked up an HDHomeRun from Silicon Dust. It's basically an HDTV tuner for computers that takes over-the-air ATSC and over-coax Clear QAM broadcasts and encodes them into MPEG-2 so you can watch and record them on a computer. QAM is the standard for digital cable and most people don't know that you can often get basic unencrypted digital channels for free over cable even if you haven't signed up for cable. UPDATE: I put this out there a little confusingly. The cable companies are mandated to offer unencrypted rebroadcasts of local channels (unless they come to another arrangement with a local broadcaster), but they aren't obligated to offer them to you. My point was that if you have cable coming into your home there is a good chance you can access those channels.

For my setup I've been using the HDHomeRun with a Mac mini, and so far have been largely satisfied with the results. I live in an apartment where I can't mount an external ATSC antenna, so I decided to use the HDHomeRun to tune into those Clear QAM channels. I get HD broadcasts of the local ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and CW affiliates, TBS, all of the C-SPAN channels, as well as a bunch of local access channels that I don't really care about. Even though most of the shows I want to watch are available online, with the HDHomeRun I can watch stuff like the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards live in HD, often with better picture quality than you'll get watching something on your cable company's DVR.

For recording and watching shows I use Elgato's EyeTV DVR software. It's decent, but not great, though there is a plug-in that integrates it with Frontrow, which does make things a bit nicer (though reportedly Frontrow might be disappearing with the release OS X Lion, so perhaps I should get so attached). EyeTV does have an app for streaming shows to an iPhone or iPad and it's pretty easy to convert files to h.264 if I want to archive a show or transfer it to another device for later watching.

I also tested the HDHomeRun with a Zino HD that Dell sent me to review. There were a few issues getting Windows Media Center to map channels properly (it's a known issue) with the HDHomeRun, but in general Windows Media Center offers a much better DVR experience and the Zino is well-suited to the living room (plus there's a version with a Blu-ray drive, which isn't an option with the Mac mini).

My new setup is a little more complicated than before -- when my mom visited she wasn't exactly thrilled when I tried to explain how everything worked -- but it's way cheaper and I no longer have to deal with that horrible Scientific Atlanta box. And since I watch about three or four hours of TV a week it's not a big deal to me that it's slightly more difficult to watch a show than before.

Would love to hear others' experiences with cutting the cord, I'm thinking of putting together a future newsletter about this stuff.