Cutting the COX Cable cord.....

[PaddyShack]

When you say OTA, are you talking about local PBS station OETA? If so, it streams for free. And if you donate $5 a month (tax-free) you get Passport which allows you to stream all the old stuff.
I'm curious what is on "local" TV that is so appealing to persons? Weather? Honestly, Twitter will update you faster than local news. Traffic? Waze or Google. Old reruns of MASH? I love Frank Burns too, but not enough to watch local commericals.

OTA = Over The Air

I do like the OETA family like Create and Worldview or whatever it is called. I do prefer to watch weather on the TV instead of using Twitter. But I agree that I can't stand to sit through long commercial breaks that are often in morning news segments.

[mkjeeves]

When you say OTA, are you talking about local PBS station OETA? If so, it streams for free. And if you donate $5 a month (tax-free) you get Passport which allows you to stream all the old stuff.
I'm curious what is on "local" TV that is so appealing to persons? Weather? Honestly, Twitter will update you faster than local news. Traffic? Waze or Google. Old reruns of MASH? I love Frank Burns too, but not enough to watch local commericals.

Over the air, I record daily OETA Newshour, CBS News and ABC News, Tonight Show. If/when I have a 4 channel DVR, I'll record all the night interview shows. Of those, I watch at least one of the national news shows and usually delete the rest. I fast forward through the monologues and watch guest interviews and performances of night shows, if they are people I am interested in.

Also on the regular Over the Air record list that may or may not ever get looked at: Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week With George Stephanopolis, Blacklist, CBS Sunday Morning, SNL, Emergence, TMZ, Shark Tank and maybe a few others the wife likes, like football. Special events when they happen, like Debates, Oscars etc. Local news if and only if there is something specific we are interested in. Weather sometimes, especially during storms. Various movies. Some PBS shows. We spend far more time watching Netflix and Amazon offerings than OTA.

[mkjeeves]

Follow up on the Silicon Dust HD Homerun Quattro...I bought one. Installed it. Simple enough, antenna in and LAN cable out to my router. plug in power. Download the HD Homerun app into my Roku and it plays TV easy peasy. I gained being able to watch OTA TV on my phone and couple of other devices that run the HD Home Run software. Recording is another thing altogether. (ABC reception through the Silicone Dust works fine, which I still have problems getting on my TIVO. I'm about to decide that is a TIVO tuner issue. I can get ABC on everything in the house except the TIVO. Have two coax from the antenna to the TIVO area, and it's the same problem regardless of which cable I use. Both cables will deliver ABC directly to the TV, just not through the TIVO.)

They make a few different models of the Silicon Dust but the Quattro at $109 does not have internal recording hardware. Some of the other models do. You can use your own PC or network connected storage device, with their paid app or the PLEX paid app and record that way. The reviews are the HD Home Run DVR app isn't very good and they mostly recommend using PLEX. Both apps are fairly cheap, $5 a month, $40 a year, $150 lifetime for PLEX. The other one is less expensive. The Quattro device came with a free month of PLEX and two free months of the HD Home Run DVR service.

I have set up the PLEX Media Server running on a desktop with a spare 500GB drive. The PC is connected with a LAN cable to the network. (I have a Western Digital My Cloud I might move storage too but it's offline after I changed out a router recently.) So far, it seems to work fine. That allows me to play any recorded show or live OTA shows on any device running PLEX, which includes PCs, tablets, Roku, phones, etc. Recorded shows can be downloaded to those devices for remote viewing. We'll see what happens when I record on all four tuners on the Silicon Dust Quatro, have other traffic on my home network, like streaming a couple of things to the TIVO and watching something on Netflix, assuming that would ever happen. Plus other network traffic.

The initial goal was to get recorded shows anywhere in the house. I think that may work for some effort, existing hardware, $109 for hardware plus software fees. Cheap solution.

[SoonerDave]

Just thought I'd mention that I today joined the "cord cutters club." Dumped the TV portion of my Cox service and, goofy as it may sound, it was stinking liberating. I shaved $109/month off my bill, which now more than pays for my $50/month YouTubeTV service plus my $6/mo CBS All Access sub, saving me a net of $53/month. No more converter boxes, no more CableCards, no more crapola.

I was originally planning to get an HDHomeRun Quatro to capture OTA stuff and set up an in-house DVR, but with YouTubeTV carrying all the main locals with the exception of Ch 43 (KAUT), I'm not even sure I need the Quatro. I picked up a nice attic-mount UHF antenna and pick up 55 local stations crystal-clear, all routed through the preamp installed when the house was built.

We'll play with the OTA setup for a while and I may still get a Quatro, but at this point, I'm doubting it.