Living Off the Paid Television Grid

After a 10 year relationship with DirecTV, we finally decided we were paying way too much for "cable" and decided to cancel our account. This had nothing to do with the quality of their service. In fact, I very much love their service and technology. It's just that the cost became too high.

But we didn't exactly quit cold turkey.

For a while now, I've run a $15 set of rabbit ears to my main computer running Windows Media Center. I can pull in every local HD channel (which numbers over 20) and record most of the programming we were watching on DirecTV. Shows like Last Man Standing, Vegas, America's Test Kitchen, Joel Osteen, Shark Tank, and many others can be had over-the-air or OTA.

And since we already have a few Xbox 360s scattered about the house, by registering them in Windows Media Center, we can stream live and recorded television to all but 1 TV in the house. Life is good.

But what about live sports?

Yes, that's a problem. Here's a look at where my teams' games are broadcast:

NFL (Cincinnati Bengals): CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, NFL Network.

MLB (Cincinnati Reds): FOX, Fox Sports Ohio, ESPN, MLB Network.

NHL (Philadelphia Flyers): NBC, NBCSN, NHL Network.

NCAAB (Cincinnati, Florida): ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, Fox Sports Ohio

NCAAF (Cincinnati, Florida): ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, sometimes a local affiliate.

So, other than NFL, I have a serious problem when I want to watch my sports teams.

My plan was to simply buy each sport's streaming service and for those that have local blackout restriction, buy a VPN service that allows me to switch my "location" to some other locale.

I bought NHL Gamecenter and watched several Flyers games on the Xbox. This was great some of the time, when the video quality was good. Sadly, it rarely was and I experienced the "white ring of death" buffering animation far too often, sometimes as much as once every 30 seconds. After a 3-email tech support conversation over the course of a half-hour, my account was cancelled and full purchase price refunded.

Another issue for me is that since I don't subscribe to video programming, I am unable to access WatchESPN for their streaming service. This is really frustrating, since it's rare to find my teams on local affiliates (although Florida football is on CBS quite often).

So for now, I make do with so-called highlights on ESPN.com or the sports' official site. Not the greatest, but until I buy a CableCard tuner, it'll have to do.

Allowing DELETE Verb on .ashx file in IIS 7+

If you ever need to use the DELETE verb with an .ashx file on IIS 7 and above, you'll need to modify the SimpleHandlerFactory Handler Module either in IIS or in your web.config. I'll show you the code to add to your web.config below.

In your system.webServer node, simply add the following:

<handlers>
    <remove name="SimpleHandlerFactory-Integrated-4.0" />
    <add name="SimpleHandlerFactory-Integrated-4.0" path="*.ashx" verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,DELETE" type="System.Web.UI.SimpleHandlerFactory" resourceType="Unspecified" requireAccess="Script" preCondition="integratedMode,runtimeVersionv4.0" />
</handlers>

I've seen other information suggesting disabling or removing a WebDAV handler, but it was not installed on my local IIS or on my production web server. The solution above worked for me.

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/a/10616736/256885