We’ve been living in the rental house for a year now (yeah, the remodel will be done any minute now), so it’s probably time to check out how our experiment of dumping a cable connection is going.
Answer: it’s going really well. We’re not going back.
Turns out that we’re not alone, of course: a lot of people are saying farewell to cable.
Pre-move, we had DSL via Speakeasy for $145 a month, plus DirectTV for $95 a month, plus Netflix for $23 ($263 a month). We had lots of premium channels (HBO, Showtime), and we didn’t buy movies. We sometimes bought stuff via iTunes, for when our system broke down or recorded a poor copy of something.
When we moved, we cancelled Speakeasy (they couldn’t get us the speed we wanted) and picked up Comcast cable internet ($63…and roughly the same speed we had before *headdesk*). And we either watched shows via iTunes, Netflix DVDs, or Netflix on Demand. The kids in particular have taken to Netflix on Demand like a duck to your Sunday picnic. Over the past year we’ve spent $1453 on the iTunes TV store (wow, that looks amazing to write out like that), or $120 a month. Plus $23 for Netflix.
Which means we’re spending roughly $203 a month now. For shows without commercials, often in higher quality than the broadcast versions.
I think I’m going to change our Netflix subscription to be the one DVD + On Demand stuff, which is something like $10 a month.
True, we don’t get sports or 24 hour news stations, but we don’t care. We don’t have the movie channels (if we really need a movie, we’ll rent it from iTunes or wait for the DVD). Our house is right near the Santa Cruz mountains, which interfere with all broadcast stations, or I would get an antenna to cover local channels.
We recently had a small vacation and while staying in the hotel sacked out in bed to watch Food Network (oh, Bobby Flay, my daughter has missed you). Used to be we were annoyed by regular TV because we couldn’t pause or fast-forward over commercials, like we could with TiVo. Now we’ve found regular TV practically unwatchable. I don’t miss it at ALL.
Comcast keeps offering us deals where we can get a faster internet connection if we also pick up a cable subscription, and the combo will cost less than it’s costing now. Darin keeps responding, “How much for just the faster internet?”
Unless one of the kids suddenly develops a need to watch sports, we’re not going back.
I thought you meant actually going without a TV.
Ours has been out for two things this year – the Test Cricket in January and last weekend’s Federal election. And has been put back away 🙂
Oh and on those occasions we’ve been so FRUSTRATED by the ads…. ugh.
Actually, I wouldn’t mind totally going without TV (except we need it for the PS3 and Wii…sigh). I watch a whole lot less TV than Darin does, and this summer especially it’s been very hard to find time to watch one of the shows we do watch together, so we’ve had weeks of episodes of “Burn Notice” and “Leverage” backed up.
TV on the whole hasn’t been very compelling at all. I was frustrated I couldn’t watch Ricky Gervais host the Golden Globes, but I got over it. 🙂
If I need news I can get it from the Internet! I
Welcome to the edge of a very big wave. I had the same hotel television flashback experience too.
We’ve actually had the hotel TV problem for years, since we got TiVo when they first came out. “What do you mean I can’t pause until these commercials are over?” Having gotten used to having no commercials at all…much, much tougher.
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