Ok, so let me tell MY side of the story regarding us disconnecting ourselves from the local cable company teet.
Over the past few weeks, I've been doing a little internal market research regarding what we watch on television here in the Hawkins household. (Since I work in the TV industry, I should be billing these hours, but alas.)
What I noticed is that we watch 90% of our television on the DVR (the Tivo-like hard drive box provided by our cable company, for those of you not television addicted.) Of the shows that we choose to record on the DVR, 90% are from the local broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC). The other 10% are home improvement shows, and that show on TLC about the "little people" (which I can only assume Erin watches because of some sort of weird reverse psychology for tall people).
The second part of my little survey involved an analysis of our monthly cable bill. We spend approximately $80 per month on cable and another $20 per month on Netflix. What bothers me about this is that we spend around $100 per month on TV and movies, and the vast majority of the programming we watch for the price of cable can be received for FREE over the air.
So I started doing a little research on our options. First off, the cable company will not let us keep our DVR box without a full cable subscription, and since we love watching the shows when we want to watch them, getting rid of the DVR is out. So I needed an alternative.
This led me to start looking at Tivo, the original DVR genies. Tivo has a high definition box available for $253 on Amazon, and this box will allow you to download movies from Amazon, which may even lead to us eliminating or greatly reducing our Netflix subscription. The Tivo box also has some other cool bells and whistles, including the ability to move shows off to your home computer where you can burn them to DVD or put them on your iPod. Plus, the Tivo service is now only between $8 and $12 per month, depending on how long a contract you sign.
So the end result is that I'm reducing our $100 per month to at least around $30, and maybe even less depending on how well the Amazon download service works. I'll keep everyone posted on how this little experiment goes. Just know that we're not going totally Amish here. Just a little.
Monday, November 12, 2007
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2 comments:
Nice manuever. I REALLY appreciate the background. Erin totally left us high a dry.
So are you just TVOing off of your antenna?
Since you're a relative and a preacher and all, I'll assume that your comment about "just TVOing off our antenna" isn't laced with judgment and snickering.
Yep, we're just using the Tivo to record the shows off the antenna. We're in a good spot in Indy for doing this, since we're only 15 minutes from all of the towers. So we actually get a good antenna signal.
But yeah, it still seems weird not having cable. I knew I'd crossed a line last night when I was watching Nova on PBS while Erin was watching Dancing With the Stars. I almost made an attempt on my own life.
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