Get Rid of Your Cable Company.
In two months my family and I will be moving into our first house. We are very excited about this but we also want to enjoy our new home and not find ourselves “house poor”. For the past few months we have been finding various ways to cut expenses and build up a pad in our bank account. One of the biggest expenses we no longer have is cable tv, which we were spending around $80 a month on. We have a large lineup of shows that we enjoy watching and for the most part we still watch those shows at little or no cost.
How we do it:
In a previous post I talked about how easily you get could digital television for free and in most cases the digital signal included programming in HD. This is the first step in ridding yourself of a cable bill. If you are busy one night and are not able to sit down and watch the initial airing of the show that is okay, you still have the ability to watch it – tivo is not a necessity.
The major networks (ABC, FOX, NBC, and CBS) put their shows online soon after they air on television, several cable networks are also now following suit. In order to view these shows I typically hook my laptop up to our Samsung flat screen via an hdmi cable and proceed to the stream available on the networks website. Another good place to get streaming video is Hulu. Hulu has material from ABC, NBC, and Fox plus movies from studios affiliated with these networks. An upside to watching these streams is the lack of commercials, the typical one hour show has 17 minutes of commercials when viewed in a traditional method but the stream may only have 3 or 4 minutes of commercials.
Being that I am a geek I do not mind strapping my laptop to the tv but my wife would never do this and if you are like her there is a couple more alternatives to explore. If you have the patience to wait, most popular tv shows release dvd’s soon after the season has completed. Netflix is an economical way to get complete episodes (commercial free btw) that you can watch at your convenience. The second way is your local library. Our local library is very large and they have a vast video collection which includes the latest realeases of many television shows and movies.
I know some of you are screaming “torrents” but I am trying to keep my advice on the legal side of the law. If you are wanting to dive into the black areas of the web this wikipedia article will help shed some light on things.
Have a suggestion or idea that I have overlooked? Let me know in the comments.
I get t.v. pretty cheap also. Over a year ago I cut our cable back to just the basic-basic for $13.00 per month. Well, we have a digital t.v. and every once in awhile we would get certain channels that for some reason cannot be blocked. About 3 months ago I decided to do a redo of my auto-channel reset and got all the digital channels that we had before basic and they are still working. Not sure if it will last forever, but it’s great for now. I figure I can’t beat that for $13.00 per month.
Melissa, nice job on the rescan, I do it from time to time on my antenna to pick up the new digital channels that are being turned on.
BTW I checked out your site and like the reuse of old gutters idea.
Great post! Just wanted to let you know you have a new subscriber- me!