Hello, for the last 14 years we've been happily using Windows Media Center with a Ceton tuner and CableCARD. But the handwriting is on the wall for CableCARD: our cable provider, Verizon, is no longer offering new or replacement cards and I figure it's just a matter of time before they disable the cards that are out there and try to get us back onto their own boxes.
So I'm weighing our options. We really enjoy and make extensive use of the ability to record as much programming as we want and then to store it for as long as we choose instead of having an arbitrary expiration date on the recordings. I looked at DirecTV Stream and they advertise "unlimited DVR storage," but the recordings expire after nine months. (This past winter during the baseball off-season, I was watching games from spring training 2018.) On the other hand, Verizon FiOS recordings don't seem to get automatically deleted after some set period of time, but then the amount of storage in their boxes is tiny and it looks like there's no way to expand it.
Another idea is to ditch traditional cable-type TV and go all-online for both streaming shows and live and time-shifted TV. This is where NextPVR may come in handy for our situation. But the reading I've been doing around the Web, including on this forum here and here, doesn't sound very hopeful if we want to preserve the ability to record live national news and live national sports and then watch them on our own schedule.
A lot (most?) of the IPTV websites I've found look dubious and we want to use only solid, legit vendors. Is there a way somehow to set NextPVR to (for example) record next Sunday night's MLB game on ESPN that's showing on Hulu Live, YouTube TV, or Fubo? As a cost-free experiment, I opened an account with Pluto TV hoping to record Bloomberg News with NextPVR, but I couldn't find any way to do it.
So, would it be fair to say that we're being wildly unrealistic and need to lower our horizons?
Please be kind! I have experience on WMC, but NextPVR and IPTV are totally new to me.
Thanks for any tips or suggestions.
So I'm weighing our options. We really enjoy and make extensive use of the ability to record as much programming as we want and then to store it for as long as we choose instead of having an arbitrary expiration date on the recordings. I looked at DirecTV Stream and they advertise "unlimited DVR storage," but the recordings expire after nine months. (This past winter during the baseball off-season, I was watching games from spring training 2018.) On the other hand, Verizon FiOS recordings don't seem to get automatically deleted after some set period of time, but then the amount of storage in their boxes is tiny and it looks like there's no way to expand it.
Another idea is to ditch traditional cable-type TV and go all-online for both streaming shows and live and time-shifted TV. This is where NextPVR may come in handy for our situation. But the reading I've been doing around the Web, including on this forum here and here, doesn't sound very hopeful if we want to preserve the ability to record live national news and live national sports and then watch them on our own schedule.
A lot (most?) of the IPTV websites I've found look dubious and we want to use only solid, legit vendors. Is there a way somehow to set NextPVR to (for example) record next Sunday night's MLB game on ESPN that's showing on Hulu Live, YouTube TV, or Fubo? As a cost-free experiment, I opened an account with Pluto TV hoping to record Bloomberg News with NextPVR, but I couldn't find any way to do it.
So, would it be fair to say that we're being wildly unrealistic and need to lower our horizons?
Please be kind! I have experience on WMC, but NextPVR and IPTV are totally new to me.
Thanks for any tips or suggestions.
