The most blessed thing about “cutting the cable” is the delightfully small bill you receive at the end of the month. I remember balking with my cable bill crossed the $100 mark. I balked again when it crossed $150 and finally to $200. Now my monthly bill is down to $60 because all we pay for is the high-speed Internet.
To supplement our video enjoyment, the HDTV comes with a variety of apps, including Netflix and Hulu. I subscribe to both, including the premium Hulu membership, which does away with all the damn commercials.
Hulu’s commercials are annoying. They didn’t appear at the program’s preset commercial breaks. No, the show is interrupted at random places for two or three commercials. Most of the advertisements are PSAs or Hulu’s own promos. But the tireless interruptions got to me, so I ponied up the extra $5/month to do away with them.
Further supplementing our Internet-Ready TV are two gizmos.
The first gizmo is the Nexus Player. It offers Google Play Movies, YouTube, and the redundant Netflix and Hulu apps, plus other apps that I’ll never use.
The second gizmo is the Amazon Fire stick. It offers the movies and shows free with my Amazon Prime subscription, plus redundant apps for Netflix, Hulu, and the rest. It also offers HBO Now, which I subscribe to and am very pleased with.
Other TVs in the house feature a Chromecast dongle. That allows me to broadcast video from my phone or tablet to the TV. After some time, I’ve trained the kids how to screencast as well, so they’re back to watching TV and some (but not all) of their favorite shows.
The things we missed the most, however, were live events.
Recently, this part of the country experienced a massive wind storm. Power was out in some places for nearly two weeks. I could get news and other information on social networking sites, but nothing beats live TV for breaking events.
We also missed live sports. ESPN offers a gamecast of all NFL games, but it’s not the same as watching a game live. Further, I pointed out to the kids that we won’t be able to watch the Super Bowl or even the Oscars. That stinks.
As a solution, I paid $25 for an HDTV antenna. It works becase local stations are required to broadcast over the air, but you need a special antenna to pick up the signals. The one I paid for came with a signal booster. Once attached to the TV, it picked up over 27 local channels. That way we can get breaking network news, sports, and some primetime events, such as the Oscars.
Now I think the setup is complete. We get pretty much everything we watched before, plus we saved a buncha money.
You cant beat Netflix, no commercials, tons of movies and documentaries, classic tv shows, all for $10 bucks a month, the price of a movie ticket. I wish I would have done this a long time ago. You cant get anything decent with cable till you pay $50 or more and then youre stuck with a bunch of stuff you dont want, in my case is sports, music and payperview channels.
Comment by BradC — December 3, 2015 @ 4:27 pm
You know, broadcast HDTV is pretty much the same. You get the regular channels, plus a few secondary channels, but a lot of it is government/public channels and, yes, shoping channels.
I believe that the shopping channels pay the providers to run their content. That might be why we see so many of them.
Comment by admin — December 4, 2015 @ 7:51 am