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George asked: “I watch a lot of shows Over-the-air. Coming up during the holidays, there will be a lot of Christmas shows. I would like a way to record those off of the air. What would be the best way to do that? “
Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of modern ways to record an over-the-air show, but you do have a few options.
If you’re not paying for cable, you’re probably not looking for options that come with a monthly fee, but we’re still going to mention the TiVo Roamio, The Roamio costs $50 and comes with a 500GB hard drive that you can fill with OTA shows, and with Netflix, HBO Go, Amazon Video, and more built in, and it can be controlled with a smartphone.
So far so good, but unfortunately, it will cost you $15/month as well… not ideal for any cord cutter. You could almost pay for Netflix and Hulu for the monthly price of paying for this DVR.
So far so good, but unfortunately, it will cost you $15/month as well
If you want DVRs that won’t chip away at your bank account every month, you can try the Nuvyyo Tablo, but it will cost you $300 instead of the Roamio’s $50.
Oh, and by the way, if you’d like access to a programming guide and the ability to record every episode of a show automatically rather than having to remember to set it every week, that will cost you either $5/month, $50/year, or a $150 one time fee.
So, you can use it without a guide and not pay a monthly fee, or you can pay $450 and use the guide for “life” (however long they choose “life” to be) with no monthly fee, or you can pay a monthly or yearly fee.
Now, if that’s too much money for you, you can look into a ChannelMaster DVR+, it costs $250, and there is no monthly fee at all. And for $250 you get to record around 2 hours of content, so try not to like any long movies… at least not if you care about the ending.
The good news is that you can buy a hard drive and extend its storage, the bad news is that someone just sold you a $250 DVR with virtually no capacity to record at all.