Pulling the Plug on Cable

It was almost six years ago, now.  I was just starting my first grown-up, fo’ real job and I felt like I was rolling in the dough.  With said dough, I rented a nice apartment than I’ll ever have again and signed up for a digital cable package so I could watch the bazillion channels of content.  I had a home-made DVR (another long story) that worked pretty well and recorded all of the shows I was interested in.

It was incredible what a difference a DVR made–I no longer just watched TV and flipped channels, I picked out those few shows that I really cared about and only watched them.  Not only that, but I could skip commercials (quite efficiently with MythTV which does it for you).  This freed me up to live my life!  I could devote my time to reading, watching movies, working out (which I actually did years ago) or drinking at my local pub.

Over time I found that I was recording less and less.  By the end I was down to The Daily Show, News Radio and Battlestar Galactica.  I was paying $60/month to watch a show I could watch for free (legally) on the Internet, one I had already watched all the way through in syndication (2 episodes/day every day and you can get through a series pretty quickly) and Battlestar Galactica.

So really, I was paying $720 /year to watch one show, which I could buy at the end of the season for $38.  It didn’t make sense.

At the end of BSG Season 2–the dramatic discovery of New Caprica and the  return of the Cylons–I  pulled the plug.

I remember standing in line at the local Time Warner Cable office.  Everyone else was there to pay a bill, or to beg to have their cable turned back on.  I was feeling pretty proud standing there with my cable box and remote in hand, smiling about all of the money I was about to save–not to mention the fact that when you don’t have cable you can say to people, “oh, I didn’t see the latest Jersey Shore, I don’t have cable.”  I handed the gear to the lady behind the counter and walked out of that office a free man, never to return.

It’s something else Anna and I have in common, she gave it up a few years ago as well, relying on DVDs and friends’ houses for precious screen-time entertainment.

So what do we do now?  OTA HDTV, of course!  We can get 16 channels of local content over the air courtesy of the antenna I made for less than $10 and a trip to Home Depot (this blog taught me how to build the antenna).  And courtesy of my homemade DVR and a $100 upgrade I made to it, we can record anything over the air and watch it when we want to.  That plus NetFlix streaming through our XBox 360 and we’re looking pretty good!

So how much is that costing us?  This will be good to know as I’ve never actually done this analysis.

Well it’s more expensive than I’d like it to be, that’s for sure, but it definitely beats $720/year I was paying earlier for cable.  We get most everything we want, though there are some notable exceptions like some of the HBO and Showtime series we watch.  Those we either have to wait to come out on DVD or resort to more dubious methods.

* Schedules Direct is a service that provides TV listings for folks like myself who have homemade DVRs and want to know when TV shows come on.  We take for granted that this information is freely available somewhere in the world, but it costs people money and time to put it together and make it available, so I’m happy to give those folks $25 a year.