The excellent Stevie Wonder doing a drum solo, although he looks like he could star in Thunderbirds or the muppets in this video.

There appears to be an increase in people canceling their Satellite or Cable subscriptions over the last couple of months. Maybe this is because of the “Credit Crunch” or maybe, like me, they are just sick of paying a load of money and barely watching any of the shows. It could be I have just noticed it more because of my experiences.

About 6 or 7 months ago I canceled my Sky subscription, fed up at the increasing cost and constant reruns. The few new shows that interested me had adverts every 10 minutes at best, yes I can quickly skip them with Sky+ as long as not watching live. For some reason Sky continued to bill me for the Sky+ feature even though I asked for it to be canceled, I decided not to re-cancel it until I was certain I could get everything I wanted.

So what have I been using to get my TV fix?

Even before canceling my subscription I often downloaded shows from the internet because it was more convenient. You could use torrents, newsgroups or the TV stations own services like iPlayer or 4OD. I have some problems with the official sites because of the DRM. I watch my downloaded shows on XBMC on my old Xboxs. I can’t do this with the iPlayer, I can only watch it on a computer or in a small part of the screen on a Wii. As far as I am concerned I have paid for BBC shows through my license and want to watch them anyway I would like to.

To get into a bit more detail I have RSS feeds setup that show me the latest shows available and I add them to my download manager and it retrieves them for later viewing. I can then watch in my bedroom or living room using XBMC or stream to any PC or phone using Orb.

I have started to watch more video from online sources such as Revision3, I regularly watch Diggnation and TRS. These are even easier to retrieve, I just add the RSS feed of the show in the format I want to my download manager and whenever a new show is posted, it is automatically downloaded to my computer. Its then there ready and waiting to be watched. This is the future of TV for me, they have advertisements in the shows but I very rarely skip over them because they are read by the people in the show and are usually tied in somehow. I’ve actually bought several things from in show Revision3 ads.

I would like to see the BBC allow me to do exactly the same and allow me to download their shows by subscribing and have them there ready and waiting for to watch on my computer and/TV with no restrictions. Sure I can set Sky+ or a Freeview recorder to download them but they are stuck on the machine that recorded them. I have also played around with TV cards but wish a Freeview box would allow me to hook it up to my network (not with USB) so I can watch the shows from anywhere.

So for now I am stuck with using an unofficial way of watching my TV from companies I am paying for (most shows I watch are BBC).

I also subscribe various other Video & Audio Podcasts such as the Daily Source Code, No Agenda, CommandN and a few others. Mevio.com could be promising but only just started playing around with this, even though I have been listening to a couple of their shows for months, if not years.

I would encourage everyone to try getting their TV through alternative sources. I could give a more technical description of how exactly I get my TV and watch it but hopefully this overview will be enough for someone to look into it themselves.