Author: TechyDad

Last week, I wrote that we had made the decision to cut cable.  On Sunday, I disconnected our cable boxes and we walked into a local Time Warner Cable office and returned them.  The employee helping us briefly tried finding us a better cable deal than we had been offered on the phone, but realized this was not to be.  So our cable TV service was turned off and we walked out as cord cutters.  We actually wound up doing better than we thought we would, cost savings-wise, as the employee in the office was able to get us a lower price for just Internet access than the phone representative was.  When we left, we were saving over $80 on our cable bill from what cable TV and Internet would have cost us.  Even factoring in Hulu and some Amazon VOD means we’ll save about $65 a month.

So how have we fared so far?

B is adjusting well to life without cable.  She actually doesn’t watch much TV to begin with and what she does watch is mostly available via Hulu.  Once Downton Abbey starts up again, we might need to supplement with some Amazon VOD, but until then she’s just fine.

I’m settling in as well.  As I’ve been typing this, I’ve been watching The Daily Show with John Stewart on Hulu and realized that Hulu will automatically proceed to the next show in the cable lineup (The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore) and then the next one after that (@Midnight with Chris Hardwick).  It’s like I’m watching my own mini-Comedy Central station!  As for my other programs, some of them ended their seasons already and I don’t mind the delay that I’m experiencing with the others.  It’s a lesson in delayed gratification.  I don’t really need to see that episode RIGHT NOW.  I can wait a week or three.

NHL and JSL seem to be getting used to the no-cable lifestyle as well.  Heading into cutting the cord, they began to complain that they would miss all of their favorite shows.  In my typical math geek fashion, I crafted  spreadsheet tracking which shows they (and the rest of us) watched.  There were over half a dozen shows that they watched that, pre-cord cutting, they just "couldn’t" do without.  After cutting cable, only two shows have been even mentioned.  NHL watching the episodes of Uncle Grandpa that have made it on Netflix.  He doesn’t mind watching the same episodes over and over and over again.

JSL, on the other hand, really misses Teen Titans Go.  He’s talked about it a few times.  I’ve been pricing the season DVDs and the Amazon VOD options out and the DVDs seem to be the better deal.  (Our savings definitely allow us to buy more DVDs.  Cutting the cord might mean less cable company profits, but it might mean more profits for the companies selling DVDs.)  The other transition he is having a tough time with are commercials – or the lack thereof.  Believe it or not, JSL actually liked commercial breaks.  When we would watch shows on our DVR, JSL would make me promise not to fast forward through the commercials.  No, he wasn’t watching them.  Instead, the commercials starting meant he could leave the couch and play with his toys for a few minutes.  Now, watching TV means either no commercials at all or a short 15 second commercial on Hulu Plus – way too short of a time to get any decent play in.

We also ordered an antenna which I quickly hooked up.  Now, we’re getting an assortment of local stations in HD.  Luckily, the area we live in has plenty of stations to choose from.  Your mileage may vary if you try this where you live, so check Antennaweb to see what stations you can get, how far away they are, and what kind of antenna you will need.

Before we cut cable, I remarked that I thought actually making the decision to cut cable would be harder than living without cable.  So far, this seems to be true.  We discussed and considered cutting cable for so long that actually getting rid of it seems almost anti-climactic.  It turns out that we really don’t miss cable all that much.  As the weeks and months pass, we’ll forget about having 200+ channels and only really caring about a dozen shows on a handful of them.  Instead, we’ll pay for only the shows we want to watch and the savings will quickly add up.

I’ve written a lot over the years about coming close to cutting the cable cord.  We’ve come close many times but pulled back from the brink.  Now, however, is different.  We’ve made the decision and will give up cable TV at the end of this week.  Soon, we will embark on a new journey as cord cutters.

First, a little history, though.

The cord has been on the chopping block since 2009.  At that time, I concluded that cutting the cable wouldn’t save us enough money.  Online video at the time was tempting, but just didn’t offer enough for the price.  One year later, I reevaluated cord cutting.  Then, the conclusion was that Netflix and our local library were serving us well, but still not well enough to switch.  (Perhaps in a moment of prescience, I declared: “I’d probably be safe to declare that we won’t cut it [cable] in the next year, but I wouldn’t be as sure about the next 3 – 5 years.”  Four and a half years later, and the cord is being cut.)

Two years ago, we moved closer than ever to cutting the cord.  Even though I figured that we would save a lot of money every month, the lure of cable TV content was too strong.  That, plus Time Warner Cable cut us a good deal.  As the deal was good for two years, this pushed the cable cutting decision out to this year.

And so we come back to the present day.

We received a note from Time Warner Cable letting us know that our current deal was expiring.  Replacing it would be a new deal that would cost us over $20 more for the same content.  Normally, this would be where we would tell them we wanted a better deal and they would provide one.  Instead, they held firm.  This *WAS* the better deal.  One representative even told us that the retail price of our package would be about $190 a month.  Just because you set a price for something doesn’t mean it’s worth that, though.  I’ve done my research and know just what we watch, what we can do without, and what it would cost to keep up with shows that we want to keep up with.

For quite awhile, I had been compiling a spreadsheet of the shows we watch, where we could get them online, and how much it all would cost versus cable TV.  They tended to fall within five different categories.

OTA/Hulu Plus

These shows were available for free if we hooked up an antenna.  Of course, cutting cable also means ditching our DVR so we would be stuck with tuning in when the station said to tune in.  If we were up with a sick kid when The Big Bang Theory was on, we could kiss that airing goodbye.  Luckily, most networks post their shows online and Hulu Plus could give us convenient access to these.  This way, if my kids want to watch the latest episode of The Flash, they don’t need to stay up past their bedtime.  We can just stream it a few days later.

Netflix

Many shows are already on Netflix.  Often, this might mean being a season behind everyone else, but for many shows I can live with that.  Plus, we already subscribe to Netflix’ streaming video service so we’re good to go here.

Amazon VOD

For some shows, Hulu and Netflix aren’t an option either due to availability or my impatience to see the latest episode.  For many of these, buying the individual episodes from Amazon VOD is the path we’ll take.  Shows cost $2.99 an episode or $2.84 if you buy the whole season.  However, this pricing is for HD quality.  HD doesn’t matter that much to us.  Yes, we still have a standard definition set in the living room.  We’re keeping it until it dies.  Even when it does, we’ll likely replace it with a 32″ HDTV, not a huge big screen TV.  The standard definition content that Amazon offers should be good enough.  For the SD version of the episodes, we’d be paying only $1.99 or $1.89 if we bought the whole season.

DVD

Most shows are released on DVD after they have their season ends on TV.  For many shows, buying the DVD or Blu-Ray of the show just isn’t worth it over Amazon VOD or waiting for the show to appear on Netflix.  For other shows, buying the DVDs can actually be cheaper.  Take Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, for example.  This Nickelodeon show has my boys hooked on turtle power and me constantly reliving my childhood years when I was hooked on the original TMNT cartoon.  There are 26 episodes in each season of TMNT.  On Amazon VOD, this would cost $49.14.  However, the show releases three or four DVDs per season.  The total to buy the DVDs is only around $35.  This means we can save about $14 by getting the DVDs instead of by buying the episodes individually.  Yes, we need to wait longer (in this case, about five months), but for shows that we don’t have a pressing need to see immediately, this is a nice option.

Skip

Watching cable TV is a lot like trying to get a small drink out of a fire hose.  You’ll get your small drink – along with a ton of other water that you really didn’t need.  When it comes down to it, there will be shows that we won’t care about after the cable TV cord is cut.  These shows will fade out for us, perhaps replaced by new shows available online and perhaps briefly brought back when we discover DVDs of them in our local library.  When it comes down to it, we have many options for video entertainment.  Cable TV is but one of many choices.  We could watch some purely online shows (like Tabletop from Geek and Sundry on YouTube), we could play some WiiU, or we could play with some fun apps on our tablets/smartphones (e.g. Minecraft).  This doesn’t even get into the non-video entertainment we can engage in such as tabletop gaming, playing with toys (a favorite of JSL who loves thinking up plotlines with his figures), or reading books.  In the end, there is plenty to occupy the time freed up by ditching some cable TV shows.

So what will we save in the end?  This is hard to say as we don’t know exactly how many Amazon VOD shows and DVDs we’ll buy.  My best estimate, though says we’ll save $23 a month after paying for Hulu Plus, Amazon VOD, and DVDs.  (I don’t count Netflix or Amazon Prime as we pay for those already and would have continued with them even had we kept cable.)  Now, this might not seem like much, but at this point it’s more the principle than the money.  We’re sick of paying more and more each month while the cable companies get more powerful.  There’s not much we can do about their ISP monopolies – our only ISP choice is Time Warner Cable and we can’t get rid of Internet – but we can opt to break free of the cable companies as much as possible and cut the cable cord.  I’ll definitely blog about our cable cord cutting experiences in the future – highs and lows.

Have you cut the cable cord?  If so, how did it go?  If not, have you considered it?

NOTE: The “No Cable TV” image above was made by combining HDTV by jgm104 and No-sign by skotan.  Both images are available from OpenClipArt.org.