At the moment, I'm strongly leaning towards WOW for all services, at least initially. Primarily because I'd like to see the new house in person for a few days, and plan out how a DirecTV dish could (or should not) be attached, prior to having an installer show up.
Were it not for the installation issue, I'd be going with DirecTV and WOW in an unbundled group. Regardless, WOW works without contracts, so I should be able to make that change if/when we choose - (have to confirm that the $70 phone/internet is available to current customers as well as new customers, however... or it's back to Comcast as a "new" customer.)
With one week to go, our energies are strongly focused on fixing up the city condo - got to make it nice for our tenants. Painting all the walls, filling nail holes, that sort of thing.
However, it's also time to talk about TV mounting and installation.
We have a Sony gorilla glass 55" LED TV. It basically looks like a large iPhone 4. And it looks fantastic on the wall.
Now, I could just put the TV on its stand, and put it on the fireplace mantle. That would be acceptable. But every day I'd see that razor thin TV and know that I could have done something cooler. And I can't live like that - we're building our electronics dream home here. So it's going on the wall.
In my current setup, the TV is mounted with an ultra-slim wall mount from Monoprice.com. I cannot stress to you enough - buy things from Monoprice. A wall mount at Best Buy can cost you $70-$120. At Monoprice, they are all essentially under $20. I think this one was $10.
And the current install looks awesome. It was a bear to install 4 HDMI cables in a TV mounted just millimeters off the wall, but the TV appears to be perfectly flush to the wall, and you can't put a price on that. But if you could, it would be $10.73.
In the new place, "wall flushness" is less important - and "tilting" becomes slightly more important. I don't need full articulation, but the center of the TV will be 6+ feet off the ground (pictures will be coming as soon as we move in, I promise), and a slight downward tilt will probably be required.
I'm thinking something like this one (left) should get the job done. And at $20.31, it's a no-brainer. It has the added benefit of not being completely flush with the wall, so we'll have some give when working with the HDMI cables.
Oh, man. I forgot about the HDMI cables. At the moment, we have 4 cables buried in the wall - one from the TiVo, one from the AppleTV, one from the Blu-Ray, and one from the AV Receiver, which functions as an Audio Return Channel (ARC), thus ensuring that the audio from the Tivo, BluRay and AppleTV gets handled by the stereo, instead of the TV speakers.
The new house has nothing but power and coax going to the TV mount area. Our components aren't going to be anywhere near that area - so we're going to need to do some HDMI wall fishing. The basement is unfinished, so I'm betting that I can (at worst) run cables down through the floor, along the basement ceiling, and back up alongside the fireplace - but I won't know what's possible until I'm in the house - and we're going to be contending with a gas start / wood burning fireplace, and all the heat (and gas lines!) that entails.
So, off to cancel Comcast, and buy a TV mount and a bunch of HDMI cables. Sorry Comcast - you've been generally great. But if I'm going to play the "new customer" game, I have to be willing to change providers every so often.
And hello to WOW Ultra TV! Anyone want to buy a TiVo Series 3 with lifetime service?
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