Im looking to cut the cable cord and go with an antenna set up. Im in a rural area with crappy cell service. Im about 100 miles from a major city and 50 miles from a not so major city. I have read a little bit of this thread but I get totally lost when all the technical talk starts flying. I dont care for recording options and that kind of stuff. Right now we have DirectTV with the mid level channel package. Ive seen those gadgets that you plug your cable into the wall to make your house wiring into an antenna. What about these other subsciption services like Kodi? How do you connect/sign-up with them? When responding please provide links to the products your talking about. Otherwise it's all gibberish to me. In case you cant tell, Im really not very tech savy.
I am so glad I dropped DirecTV - what I've saved losing that for the past ~8 months has easily paid for all the assorted boxes and disk drives I've bought since then.
You mention Kodi so I assume you are looking at streaming as well. You didn't mention if you have good internet service? For good streaming, you'd probably need at least a real 10MB/s, and if your service has a data cap you'd need something like 500 MB/month or more depending upon how much you'd watch online. Most popular streaming services are Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, that provide more than enough content for most people. The main issue is how to get that service from your PC to your TV. If your PC has an HDMI output, you could connect them directly, but to me, that's not a particularly convenient arrangement. Another option is casting from your PC to the TV. Any PC with wifi can cast, some TV's have a cast receiver built in. Otherwise, you'd need a cast receiver like a
Chromecast. But that still ties you to your PC. I've had a Chromecast, but now it's a waste compared to a dedicated media player like
Roku or
Fire. (Both Roku and Fire have several different models.) Both Roku or Fire connect to your wifi. I have both of them and I think that the Roku is easier to use; both can receive (the subscription-required) Netflix/Hulu/Prime and a ton of other streaming services. You can add premium services (HBO, Showtime, etc.) to Hulu or Fire, or directly to Roku (makes no difference as far as I can tell). Note also that Roku is now built-in to some new TV's, and 'smart' TV's can get streaming services directly. Sling is another a media player, but I don't think it compares well to Roku or Fire; there are other players too. Note that these streaming services don't provide much of network TV. Hulu has some current TV series, and both Hulu and Netflix have a lot of old TV series. There are also lots of other free streaming services that can be added to Roku/Fire (usually with commercials). Sheesh, I read that back and it's an overlapping mess of devices and services. Good luck.
I'll try and summarize the above. If you have satisfactory internet, home wifi, and a normal TV (non-smart, non-Roku) I'd suggest a Roku media player, and then subscribe to your choice of Hulu, Netflix, and/or Prime. You can add premium channels (HBO, Showtime..) to that. And you're streaming.
Also, Sling is also a subscription service (besides a media player); I tried the free trial and it wasn't very good. Also Also, I had Kodi installed for a while and found its menu system far too obtuse; my wife would have never figured it out.
For Over-the-Air (OtA) you're going to need a premium antenna. Those 'house wiring antennas' are garbage. Halfway down the
page here is a place where you can enter your zip code and see what stations are in your reception area. That page also has some articles on TV antennas. I was pleasantly surprised at all the content (old movies and TV series) that was available on the subchannels (e.g., 7.1, 7.2, 7.3...) besides the network TV. Now you can just connect your antenna to your TV, but then you have to put up with commercials and watch TV on
their schedule. I hate commercials and I'm not gonna get up at 2 AM to catch an old movie. So to avoid that you need a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) capability. You can get an add-in tuner card for your PC (pretty cheaply, I think) but I don't know much about them. The simple DVR that I love is the
Tablo. The Tablo is a multi-channel, stand-alone OtA TV receiver and DVR that connects directly to your antenna. It then connects to your media player device (Roku or Fire) over your wifi. You can then watch the recorded content on
your schedule and FF thru commercials. The $200 model has 4 channels and requires an external USB hard drive. The $140 model is 2 channels, and has 64G of internal storage, but can also use an external USB drive. A 1-to-8 Terabyte USB drive will cost something like $40 to $140. Depends upon how much TV you'll watch. The TV guide service for Tablo is a $5/month subscription (necessary IMO).
To summarize the above mess, if you have satisfactory internet, home wifi, normal TV, and a Roku, you'll need a premium antenna for basic OtA. For recording and commercial skipping, add either model of Tablo, and a 2 or 4 TB external USB disk drive.
The third leg of the entertainment triad is to put all of your DVD's on a server so that they are easily accessible. Good thing about this is that it's mostly free, except for the disk storage which will need 2-8 GB per movie. This requires some free ripping software, Handbrake and MakeMKV, and free media server software: PLEX or Emby all of which run on your PC. There is a learning curve to ripping, and I'm not all the way up it yet. BluRay's are harder to rip than DVD's, and some disks just don't rip. The media server software installs pretty easily and is even easier to use.