So What Happened?

I know I'm not alone in a unanimous hatred for Comcast. Their price, service, company, and support were all unacceptable for me so I decided to get rid of them. Thankfully I had exactly one choice of a competitor and decided to switch to just an internet connection and no cable TV or home phone. I snagged a 150/75 fiber-to-the-premise connection for $45/month which blew mind mind. So far the service has been flawless with no downtime.

My Goals

I needed something to be able to replace our media consumption experience while keeping a "wife-friendly" user experience. I also needed to keep monthly costs low enough to warrant dropping the convenience of the cable TV. This was going to be a challenge.

What I'm Doing

Providers
I snagged a 150/75 fiber-to-the-premise connection for $45/month which blew mymind. So far the service has been flawless with no downtime. For movies and TV I have both an Amazon Prime account and a Netflix account. I had both of these prior to cutting the cord so these weren't an added cost of this whole process. Lastly due to a new live TV feature recently launched, I upgraded to a Plex Premium membership for $5/month.

Hardware
I ran into a Craigslist posting for a business class Xeon server with the intention of turning it into a NAS (network attached storage) for my home. On this machine I tested a few options for what I wanted as a OS and settled on unRAID, more on that later. For this machine I went to a local electronics recycling company and asked about hard drives. They gave me (6) 2TB hard drives for $30 each! One drive served as a parity drive for some fault tolerance.

I live within 50 miles of Boston so I also got an amplified HDTV antenna for $80 along with a device called HDHomeRun for $99.

For home phone, I picked up an Ooma VOIP device on Craigslist for $50. Their monthly service is free, you merely pay monthly taxes and regulatory fees which come out to under $5/month.

To view content on my TVs throughout the house, I used one Google Nexus Player for the living room and all other TVs have a Chromecast. In hindsight I wish I owned an Nvidia Shield TV instead of the Nexus Player.

Software
unRaid is absolutely amazing. I chose unRaid for it's ease of use and features. It supports Docker containers which let me run applications like Deluge, Radarr, Sonarr, OpenVPN, and lastly Plex. I personally prefer Kodi as a media player, but Plex won in the "wife-friendly" category.

Final Thoughts

After making the switch I didn't look back. The only negatives I can muster are that while it's "wife-friendly", it's not mother-in-law-friendly. I missed live TV for the time I was using my setup before Plex launched their live TV compatibility, but now I can get my local news and channel surfing for the times I don't want to have to make a decision on what to watch on demand.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below and I'll be happy to provide some help and guidance if you want to attempt to go down this path.