Watching Good Old Fashioned American TV via Slingbox

Well, after a few months of only have like 5 English speaking TV channels (how much of Donald Trump True Hollywood Story and The Kardashians on "E" can one person take?), we decided we needed some major TV overhauls. Plus, although it's only August, our minds have already started thinking about FOOTBALL season. We would definitely not be getting any games on our Swiss cable. So, after some researching, we decided to go the Slingbox route.

Now, if you were like me and have no idea what a Slingbox is, let me give you a little background. Basically, we re-subscribed to our Direct TV service that we had in NJ. We get a Direct TV box complete with a DVR and it gets installed in some server room somewhere in California. (At the company we bought a Slingbox from.) The Slingbox is a piece of equipment that allows us to "sling"what we want to watch (via a slingbox) to the internet. We access our account and can change the channels (like we would with a remote) and can record things like we would have done with our previous Direct TV box. The company that hosts our box is on the west coast, so the local channels (like NBC, etc.) are on CA time. So, if I wanted to watch an 8pm NBC show live…I would have to watch in on my computer at 5Am our time. Instead…we would just “record” the show and watch it the next day on our computer. This slingbox thing lets us watch whatever we want to watch on our Direct TV box on any computer. We usually take our laptop and project this onto our TV so we can see it bigger. It’s pretty neat. It’s just letting us watch our Direct TV on our computer. Eventually, they are developing a “Sling catcher” that we can then plug right into our wireless router and then we can watch directly on our TV. That’s apparently a few months off. It’s pretty amazing stuff. Here’s a website that explains it further and probably better than I’ve attempted to. http://www.a2btv.com/what_how.php

So, we are definitely technologically advanced, but for Football season and the fall TV season, we are all set. I'm very excited, especially since you can't watch TV shows in Switzerland on NBC.com, etc. They disable the shows on their websites for non-US locations.

All in all, though, we definitely watch a lot less TV than we did in the States and I think that is definitely a good thing. :)