Lazy Man and Money

Can You Really Buy Your Own Cable Box?

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Short answer: Maybe. Read on for the longer answer.

For years I tried to avoid paying the “cable box rental fee.”

Why? It makes no sense.

For years we could plug a coaxial into our TVs and get cable television. The technology worked and we liked it!. Now my cable company (Cox) requires me to rent a small box to do what we did before. It’s very cheap at just a couple dollars a month. We’re lucky in that in that we can use that for the bedroom television… I have bigger fish to fry than worry about around $30 a year.

However, I can see that being more than a hundred dollars a year for some families with more televisions. When the kids grow, I can imagine them wanting their own televisions. (I’m not saying that is going to happen, but it is a bridge to cross.)

The cost of DVR is a different story. Historically, a DVR is essentially a cable box with a hard drive in it. They cable companies often jack-up the price to $15 a month for this hard drive. It’s not even a big hard drive. Also these boxes are greatly run-up your electricity bill.

I say, “historically”, because many cable companies are adding a cloud service to the package. It is a good value, but not something that is worth paying a monthly subscription fee for. (Tech people know to look into Plex and other ways to stream their media.)

Cutting the cable

That sums up my problem with cable companies and their boxes/cloud. It doesn’t need to be charged as a recurring service, but they do it anyway. At $15 a month, it’s $1800 for one box over 10 years.

Wouldn’t it be nice to just buy it once for a couple of hundred dollars and be done with it?

For years, I believed that wasn’t possible. I got so frustrated that I created my own DVR with a Windows 7 computer and HD Homerun Prime.

So imagine my surprise when I read this Yahoo Finance article. It’s authored by David Pogue is super-star in technology journalism.

However, what I found interesting is that the article doesn’t give a popular marketplace to buy it. He doesn’t suggest Amazon, Best Buy, or Frys as possible places to buy. Instead he lists “Cableboxandmodem.com” and doesn’t even link to it in the article. Aesthetically, Cableboxandmodem.com doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence (I know I shouldn’t throw stones.)

It’s all very weird and I don’t know what to think. What do you think? Would you try to buy a cable modem through a website like this?

Kill Your Cable Box (DVR) Monthly Fees!

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For the last 3.5 years I haven’t paid the cable company a penny in rental fees for a cable boxes. I didn’t sacrifice any features I use and actually gained quite a few.

Most people pay around $8/mo. for a dumb box (no DVR) or $16/mo. for (limited) DVR storage. I was one of those paying $16/month before I switched to my new system. It has saved me more than $650 over that time.

I’m going to tell you how you can do the same. However first, a little back story.

The Quest for Cable Box Freedom

A few years ago, I realized that I have been renting cable boxes for 7-8 years… and television technology hadn’t changed much. There was the move to HD, but at the core, it was still a DVR. DVR was the innovation that TiVo popularized back in 1999, when it created software to pair with its computer hardware to record video to a hard drive for later viewing as well as pausing, rewinding, and all the things we love about DVR.

There’s no good reason (other than a cable monopoly) for someone to have to rent a computer with a hard drive for the DVR experience. There’s only one small ongoing cost and it’s updating the guide… something that’s been included with cable service for years.

Over the years, I had spent around $1500 in renting DVR boxes. They weren’t getting any better.

To top it off, they are incredible power hogs adding as much as another $8 a month in energy bills. In total, we are looking at more than $275 a year for DVR.

The situation that consumers find themsevles in is crazy. It’s like being forced to have to rent a television at insane Rent-A-Center rates to work with your cable company’s service. How would you react if you had to spend $100 a month ($1200 a year) for a television that was very, very old technology? That’s what most consumers get with their cable boxes.

And don’t try upgrade your cable box, you’ll lose all your content. If properly designed, they could make the hard drives swappable so that you could get your content, but they don’t do that. They also don’t offer a way to download the content so you could archive it.

With the exception of the cloud services, the whole technology is stuck in 2004.

There must be a way to stop the insanity, right?

There is.

CableCARD and HDHomeRun Prime

Back in 1996, it seems there was legislation that required cable companies to provide a means for people to not be locked into proprietary cable boxes. The result was CableCARD, a technology that was included in a few televisions, which very few people used.

Why did no one use them? Cable companies resisted it. The average consumer wouldn’t know about it. In addition, it cost more for television-makers to implement the technology. Consumers naturally took the cheaper option. And by the time it was really effective (around 2007 from the Wikipedia reference), people wanted DVR. CableCARD doesn’t give you DVR, just the ability to receive and decode cable without a set-top box. People weren’t really getting the functionality they wanted, when they bought a television with a CableCARD slot.

CableCARD did find a home in Tivo boxes. The devices work well with CableCARDs and fans of the technology seem to love it. Unfortunately, TiVO is expensive. It comes with the same subscription fees just like your cable DVR’s. You can get a “lifetime” subscription, but it is very misleading. The “lifetime” is of a device (which obviously has no “life”) and not the buyer’s lifetime as one would expect. Also the lifetime subscription is around $500, which will likely carry you to when your device is obsolete. Then you’ll buy a new one with a new “lifetime” subscription.

It became clear to me that Tivo wasn’t a good way to avoid subscription fees. It was a way to pay them at once.

The Winning Combination

You can avoid all these things by piecing together a few computer parts. I go into great detail here, but for the most part you need:

  1. A Computer
  2. HDHomeRun Prime
  3. Windows 7

The Computer

You don’t need a very powerful computer, I bought the most powerful available Dell Zino nearly four years ago… and they were a little old at the time.

For those who care, it is a AMD Phenom II P940 Quad-Core with a PassMark score of 1674. It uses 35 watts of power. One of the lowest end newer chips today is this Intel Core M with a PassMark score of 2747. It uses 4.5 watts.

Much more power in at a fraction of the energy… isn’t technology awesome!

The Zino has more than handled everything that I threw at it in terms of powering video on my television.

You could attempt to use an Intel Compute Stick, but at a PassMark of 878 I’d wait until the next version is released.

In the meantime, this Intel NUC for under $300 will give you more power than you’ll need and it is a damn cute, wife-pleasing 5-inches by 5-inches (much smaller than that big cable box).

As as much storage space as your like… or as your budget allows. I wouldn’t recommend a SSD, because you don’t need that kind of speed… and they are pricy.

HDHomeRun Prime

This hardware (currently $99), allows you to insert a CableCARD and get all the live channels from your cable company. Sadly, satellite companies and fiber-optic companies (such as Verizon FIOS) don’t need to adhere to the CableCARD standard and you are out of luck with those.

In technology terms it gives you the three television tuners so you can record three things at one time.

Windows 7

Finally, you’ll want Windows 7. Why? Because it contains Windows Media Center (WMC), which is the only software on the planet that works with the HDHomeRun Prime to give you access to copy-protected channels like HBO. If you don’t care about those, you could do it with Linux and Myth TV, but then you get into an especially techie solution.

You can also do it Windows 8, but Microsoft pushed WMC to a premium tier that cost more money and/or required an extra purchase that could cost as much as $100.

Sadly, WMC won’t be offered in Windows 10 at all. Microsoft pulled the plug saying that there wasn’t demand. There wasn’t, because no one has made a particularly user-friendly version of this solution and marketed it. (I have a conspiracy theory that the cable companies are paying Microsoft big money to back down so that they can keep renting DVRs to people at crazy prices. It’s the only reason I can think of why Microsoft isn’t pushing their own cable box solutions like they push Surface.)

Getting Windows 7 isn’t exactly easy, but ZDNet has a bunch of legal ways to get it cheap or even free. It’s better to get it now, before all the options go away.

Show Me The Money!

You combine the three pieces (grab your nearest 14-year old if you need help) and you should be ready to go. Oh you’ll also want this Windows Media Center Remote Control.

Since I went solar, I’ve been paying crazy attention how much power I use. It is shocking to me that cable boxes can use 500 watts. I think the whole solution would probably take around 20 watts or less. So you’d see that $8 monthly electricity bill drop to around 30 cents.

When you add it all up, that annual $275 or so comes to under $5. The hardware will set you back $400 or so to start, but it should pay for itself in under two years. I think that’s a solid return on your investment.

Cable TV Boxes: The Sneaky Power Hog

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One of the most surprising things I’ve learned in the past few years is that cable boxes require a ton of electricity. (That statement came out sadder than I intended it to.) I was reminded of this recently by a great story in the LA Times.

The small boxes can use as much as $8 of electricity a month, according to the article… second to only air conditioners. While $8 might not blow you away, it does add up, especially if you a bunch of televisions in your house.

The tragedy of the situation is that it is completely unnecessary. At it’s core, a DVR is simply a computer hard drive. The cable box itself is a very simple specialized computer that hasn’t caught up with the advances of computers. I switched out my cable box for a computer running Windows Media Center and a CableCARD and haven’t looked back. For me the electricity cost is dependent on the computer. Computers have gotten more and more power-friendly as people demand longer battery life.

The article covers that:

“Energy experts say the boxes could be just as efficient as smartphones, laptop computers or other electronic devices that use a fraction of the power thanks to microprocessors and other technology that conserves electricity. Ideally, they say, these boxes could be put into a deep sleep mode when turned off, cutting consumption to a few watts. At that rate, a box could cost less than $1 a month for power, depending on how much it is used.”

Imagine taking the appliance that uses the most electricity in many homes and reducing it to 1/8th of its consumption. That would be tremendous, not just for consumer’s wallets, but for the carbon footprint.

Alas, it might be years before it happens. My guess is that most people will be using the cloud to record their shows, which is a whole different ball of wax electricity-wise. Why can’t we have more efficient cable boxes today?

According to the article, there’s no incentive for cable companies. It is a broken system. Consumers have no choice which cable box they get (unless you count the workaround I used, but you have to be a bit of a tech-whiz). I can’t start up a company selling or renting efficient Comcast boxes. It’s a shame, because it would probably do well once people realize they could save $75 a bucks a year with my product.

The article quotes expert Steve Kelley who brought an analogy that really hit me:

“The nation’s shopping malls annually use hundreds of millions of dollars of electricity, he said, but their owners are often indifferent about reducing power consumption because tenants pay the bills. [Kelly said] ‘The mall owners often won’t consider spending $50,000 on a system that would pay for itself, because they don’t share in the savings.'”

The end result is that it is up to the government to create power requirement standards. The article ends on a bit of a depressing note. Energy advocates have gotten the cable industry to agree to voluntarily reduce power consumption by 10% to 45% by 2017, but this is just a small amount of what could be done today. By 2017, we will likely be talking about having laptops with a full 24 hours of battery. Even with improvements in that range, there will be so much more that could be done so easily.

Finally, there’s no penalty for non-compliance. So if the cable companies don’t do it, you’ll probably just hear a vocal minority complain… if you hear it at all.