Non-Cable TV Options

Avid follower(s) of our blog have read about our TV-less months. We're making up for lost time. Now that we have a new digital TV, we get a large number of channels with only an antenna. Admittedly, some of these are weird channels, like the one showing episodes of TV from the 1970s, but still many options with the major networks and PBS.

But...no ESPN. This campground doesn't have cable, so if we want to watch sports that aren't on the major networks (turns out not all of them are any more) we need ESPN.

Many people here have Direct TV dishes on their sites. They are planning to be here for the long haul, so that works for them. You can also get what's called a Tailgater which is a mobile satellite unit to pick up TV stations. For that, you need to purchase the little satellite thing and pay a monthly fee. However, you can turn off the service when you don't need it.

We've gone in a different direction. Since our new TV is a Smart TV, we have signed up for Sling TV. It's $20/month and we can pause our subscription any time. The WiFi here is excellent, so it works well for us. We can watch live TV from ESPN, ESPN2, TNT, TBS, Food Network, HGTV and several other channels.

When we move to another campground, if cable is included with our site fee, then we'll turn off Sling while we are there. If they don't have cable and the WiFi is slow...then we might be back to antenna channels.

If you have cable and good WiFi, you might consider Sling TV instead of your cable channels. The situation we have now is ideal for us because we get local news and network TV via the antenna and then the cable stations we like with Sling.

With the Smart TV we can also access YouTube, so that can be an endless source of time wasting too.

Still...there are many times we click through all our options and say "but there's nothing on."