TV on a cruising boat

[Hudson Force]

I have a little loop antennae at the top of my mizzen mast that is not suitable for any reception away from the US coast, but it suits us well for some news, weather and such at times. For weather further away we do pretty well with a short wave receiver. Our TV needs don't require anything fancier, but I wouldn't find any need to critisize TV watching for those that want the satilite rotating dishes. 'better for you than spending the evening drinking rum.

[LauderBoy]

Originally Posted by MysticGringo

I'm not really interested in watching tv... I hate being "controlled" by when "they" schedule the shows if watch. So I'm more interested in using data (cell or wifi) to stream Netflix or Hulu. Would that be a solution for you?

Streaming may not work so well because those solutions require somewhat reliable internet access while you're watching the shows.

Personally I find the best option to be to download the content you want to watch while you have reliable internet and have it stored for later. A typical TV show might be 200 megs, 700-800 megs for a movie. It's not a huge deal to have a netbook with a 1 TB hard drive that can display media over HDMI to a LED LCD TV. Both netbooks and LED LCD TVs are pretty low wattage too. A netbook can even use a car adapter and plug directly into the 12v system.

So basically when you're in areas with internet access just download all your shows and movies, keep them on your netbook and then while at anchor you can consume your content. You can download the shows via Torrent or you can always just buy/borrow DvDs and copy them onto the netbook.

I do the same thing with books. I have something like 100 novels ready to read on my tablet.

With today's hard drive sizes you can easily carry thousands of books, songs and movies/TV shows on a small computer hard drive. Tablets, netbooks and modern TVs can all show them pretty easily too and are getting more and more energy efficient.

[SunDevil]

My plan would be to use my laptop to play DVDs of TV show seasons. I also have quite a few movies to catch up on.

I do have a usb TV tuner that works and can record without me being there...

[tomfl]

There is a difference between live TV and saved media. One of my biggest reasons for wanting to get live TV reception is for the weather. There is not much point in saving the weather report since it really is not much use a couple of days after it has been recorded. There are other current events that have limited shelf life. The entertainment value of TV is just an extra added attraction to being in contact with current news, sports, and weather.

[LauderBoy]

What about something like Sirius Marine Weather - SiriusXM Radio for weather?

I'd think a marine weather system would be a lot more useful than land TV weather news. There are a lot of options out there for marine weather and a lot of different price points.

[Amapola]

We use a KVH with DirecTV and get our local channels as far as Nassau. We rely on XM Weather for weather.