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How Your Local Restaurant Doesn 't Charge

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Your local restaurant doesn 't charge you a fixed price and tell you to gorge yourself on whatever comes out of the kitchen. Most restaurants operate on an à la carte basis, allowing diners to choose foods they like from the menu and eat only what they want (and can afford). If you don’t like broccoli or raspberries, you don 't pay for them; if you’re a vegetarian you don 't subsidize the meal of the carnivore at the next table.

Cable companies don’t operate like that. Comcast and AT&T package all that “food” and shove it down their customers’ throats like the Widette family descending on a smorgasbord. You want a serving of TVLand so you can watch reruns of “Golden Girls”? You gotta take the Golf Channel, too. Wanna catch the latest …show more content…

If you’re on the opposite side of a hill or surrounded by tall buildings, you might need a rooftop design. According to the two sites, we can pick up 64 digital channels at our house.

Buy a Mohu Leat HDTV antenna at Amazon.com
Mohu Leaf at Amazon
We bought a Mohu amplified antenna for each television; sleek modern designs unlike Grandpa 's rabbit-ears and tinfoil The manufacturer claims they 're good for up to 25 miles, but we needed a signal boost because the TVs are on the far side of the house from the towers, so the signal also had to penetrate several walls. That cost about $120, plus the time to fiddle with the antennas and get them located and oriented correctly. We can now pull in the major networks - ABC, CBS, CW, Fox, ION, my 20, NBC and PBS - in HD for the first time, plus secondary channels that broadcast old movies or reruns. In addition, we can get perhaps a dozen Spanish-language stations, twenty or so different religions stations, and even a Vietnamese-language channel.

Streaming Media Players

Step two was to join the world of streaming content. Our Toshiba set is a smart TV that connects to our wireless network, but we expanded on that capability by adding two popular streaming media players. One is Google 's Chromecast, the second is a Roku 2. Although many "cut the cable" articles were

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