[EdHoch]

Greetings All,

With the coming conversion to Digital broadcast, my family is considering making some significant changes in our TV viewing habits. However, I have no idea if our plan is even feasible, so I thought I throw it out here and see what you all thought.

We have two TVs in our household, one is a 46" Widescreen Mits that is HD ready. The other is an 36" standard Mits circa 1991 that probably needs a converter box.

We currently subscribe to DirecTV.

Here's the plan:

Obtain converter for old TV

Buy HD antenna to obtain local broadcast channels (How much do those cost, as is there a way to test for what channels I can get in my location before buying the thing and putting it on the roof?)

Drop DTV

Use some of money saved on DTV to join Netflix and use that to augment our meager channel choices...get caught up on all those shows I never watched when they were originially broadcast (24, Battlestar Galactica, Serenity etc)

What I will miss the most about DTV (aside from the Daily Show and the NBA on TNT) is the DVR functionality. With only a few channels, I won't need 100GB of disc space, but will any of these Digital converter boxes have DVR funtionality (recording, pause live TV) or are those versions still prohibitively expensive?

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

[Doug_H]

Both of your TV's will work without a converter if you are using DTV which is already digital.

If you have another reason for changing there are several websites that show you what channels you can receive with different powered antennas.

[Jeff Gatie]

A Tivo will work with broadcast TV, but you'll need to get an HD one.

[Stephen Tu]

AntennaWeb
will tell you how big an antenna you'll need and what stations you will be able to pull in. Take note that some stations may switch their frequencies back to VHF or to different UHF channel after the transition date so that may have an effect on what kind of antenna you buy. (May need VHF/UHF combo instead of just UHF). Note there is nothing about HD that requires anything special about the antenna, you don't need an "HD antenna", just one that pulls in the appropriate frequency band(s).

DVRs -- only currently produced option is TivoHD, @ ~$250 + Tivo sub fees. There is an Echostar DVR coming out under the Sling brand that was announced (ETA August) that's cheaper & might be a good candidate. The other option is to set up an HTPC with a tuner card though that would be more difficult to operate.