I watch mainly local news, CBS, and ABC. When football season starts again, I'd like to be able to watch that as well, and we also have Disney Jr. in heavy rotation for my lil' guy. Given the fact we don't watch too much television and have no need for pay channels such as HBO, what would be the best course of action?
PoohBearPenguin
Favorite Answer
An antenna will get you your local channels, and whatever football games they carry. Use of an antenna is free but what channels you can get will depend on where you live and the type of antenna you use. Check out www.antennaweb.org to get started.
Disney Jr. will be tricky though. You might want to check Hulu and Netflix to see what they offer in terms of childrens' programming. Netflix has a special Kids interface that only allows them to access children shows and that might be sufficient for your son.
Now, some new streaming services are showing up that just stream live cable TV to your computer or device, but they're fairly new. They don't carry many channels, and lack other features (such as recording) you would get from your cable provider. However they're pretty cheap - about $20 month.
They might carry The Disney Channel but I don't know about Disney Jr.
You can check them out here:
* Sling TV (www.sling.com)
* Sony Vue (playstationnetwork.com/vue) (this one is only available on Sony's Playstation 3 and Playstation 4, but clients for other devices are coming soon.)
Grumpy Mac
Go to www.antennaweb.org and follow the instructions. It will tell you the channels you might get with an indoor vs outdoor antenna.
The 'broadcast' networks like ABC, CBS, NBC should be free & available. This is one of the few ways to get sports as sports franchises have been locked down by the main TV networks for years and vice versa (Ever try to watch a game only to have it blacked out?). You are not going to find too many sports via the internet because of this, although this is changing.
Disney is a cable channel. Never broadcast, not streamed.
You have thrown together hardware & streaming services in your question so you are basically asking for everything. There are thousands of websites to help you 'cut the cable' and literally millions of articles & posts on this. So please don't waste our time.
One thing to consider - call your cable company and reduce to "basic" service. See what that does to your bill & viewing services. You wont get Disney - but you will get 30 or more channels, including the big networks for ... $35-$45. If you can get a DVR for this price, it might be worth it.