The Essentials: The Missing Piece to My Cord Cutting Home (Premium)

The Essentials is a reoccurring column where I talk about what I use to write, work and honestly, survive the week.
A few weeks ago, I learned that I will spend $100 to not get off of the couch. Ok, that might be a bit of an exaggeration but in my pursuit to find the optimal cord-cutting setup, I believe I have completed my transition from subscribing to a cable service to moving completely to alternative solutions.

I've written about my experiences previously and you can read about that here, so consider this a small update rather than a detailed look at my entire setup.

Because we purchase movies on iTunes, our 'cord-cutting' pivots around an Apple TV as we have them connected to our two primary TVs. Last month, I finally upgraded my Apple TVs (second gen...these things were old and didn't support 1080P or have access to an app store) to the 4k iterations which opened up new options for consuming content.

The biggest change with the new boxes is that it allowed us to use the app store on the devices. Because of this, I finally stopped using an antenna inside my house and purchased and HDHomerun and let me tell you, this was an excellent move.

The device costs $75 for the two-tuner model (there is a 4 tuner model for about double the price) and what this allows you to do is to take the digital over-the-air TV signals and pump them across your home network. With this box, you can watch TV on your phone, laptop, tablet, and yes, an Apple TV.

It was incredibly easy to setup; connect it to your antenna, hardwire it to the router, and navigate to one webpage. The device was recognized instantly, it took about 2 minutes of it to scan and identify the channels and that was it.

But here's an annoying catch, there isn't a native app from SiliconDust (makes of the HDHomeRun) for the Apple TV but there is a third party solution called Channels, while excellent, is $25. All-in, I'm $100 down but what this allows me to do is to watch over-the-air TV through my Apple TV on both of our primary TVs without having to change the TV input; yes, I spent $100 so I don't have to change the input on my TV.

It's a bit more complicated than not wanting to get off the couch. By utilizing an antenna that connects to your router, this allowed me to move my antenna which made it significantly easier to put it outside where reception is much better (seriously, if I had the blinds closed, CBS would cut-out).

The image to the right is a poorly shot picture of the Channels app on the Apple TV ( no functionality for a screenshot, sadly) that shows a guide of what is playing on all the available channels (I currently can watch about 40 channels of OTA content).

If you have been watching my Twitter feed this week, the next 'problem' I encountered, if you want to call it that, is pushing uncompressed HD video across your home network can be a fun stress test on the airwaves. While I haven't had any major issues, I did purchase a switch to make it po...