How I saved $100 a month on cable TV and learned to love the Hulu.
At the beginning of September, I walked outside the house with a hatchet in hand and chopped the single line of coax that kept my household wired into the universe. I severed the cable TV.
Not literally, of course. That would have been pretty stupid – especially considering that our house kept the cable Internet connection as part of Plan B: Watch only what we could retrieve from the Internet. One connection, one bill.
More literally, all three members of our household gathered up the remnants of cable that would have to go back to Comcast – cable boxes, remotes, wires – and heaped them into a tangled corpse on the coffee table. And when it was time to finally make the move, we plucked that last DVR from beneath the 42-inch TV in our living room and replaced it with a computer.
It was time to become an Internet TV household.
The $100 that Broke the Camel’s Back
Like giving up the grocery store and dedicating yourself to foraging for food in the wilderness for the rest of your days, giving up cable in favor of Internet television was not a decision to be made lightly.
After getting weaned onto a 42 basic cable channels as a tender youngster, graduating (quite literally) to over 200 channels in college, and luxuriating in the capabilities of high-def and a DVR in my current house, I had developed quite an affinity for the lovely box that brought such a diversity of programming into the house.
Or “spoiled,” if you prefer. Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, National Geographic, even BBC America. There was always something on, and if there wasn’t, the DVR always had some scraps to hold us over.
But all those channels – plus a high-def DVR and individual cable boxes for every bedroom – weren’t coming cheap. Comcast, our local leech of a cable provider, charged us over $100 per month for the privilege, on top of our Internet bill. Even between three roommates, it was expensive.
When we collectively decided to tighten our belts a bit and reevaluate our utilities, the number stuck out like an iceberg. It alone soaked up more of our money than any other expense on the list. And unlike heating and water, we could nix it at any time.
So we did.
Plan B: Cheaping Out
We were done shoveling $100 every month into the furnace that is Comcast Cable. But we weren’t quite ready to give up on TV all together. Instead, we vowed to find every show, movie and newscast we watched from the Internet alone.
It’s a project that probably wouldn’t have been possible five years ago. Cancelling cable would have meant going off the grid, subsisting on a handful of DVDs and borrowed VHS tapes from those cable-carrying friends who took pity on you and offered to tape the latest Survivor.
Not so anymore. The emergence of Hulu, YouTube, Amazon Video on Demand, iTunes, Xbox Video Marketplace, and other options have totally changed the landscape for video through the Web. A computer can be as much a cable box today as a cable box can. And we were determined to prove it.
Cable Hangover
After having hundreds of channels at my fingertips, every second of the day, the first day without cable felt a bit rough.
Having totally failed to prepare for the transition, we were left with my roommate’s five-year-old Dell desktop, a machine barely suitable for e-mail, but which was already connected to the TV due to his lack of a monitor. Without a proper video card, it couldn’t even drive the proper 720p resolution our Samsung DLP television demanded, leaving us with a fuzzy, stretched and distorted image. But it worked. And South Park didn’t really look that much worse.
Still, I knew we could do better. And after lugging home an ancient Compaq gaming machine with a fried power supply from work, I had the answer. I scored a $5 power supply at FreeGeek, and a home theater PC was born.
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RSSMy name is Brad Stewart. I am a student at Northwestern University in the Medill School of Journalism. For my final project, I am reporting on cable, satellite, and online television. I was hoping to speak with anyone willing to share their exprience briefly about your experience canceling cable TV. If interested, please email me at bradstewart@u.northwestern.edu. It will only take ten to fifteen minutes of your time and will be extremely valuable for my story.
Thanks,
Brad Stewart
Medill 2013
First, i started out with my Desktop. Before this whole endeavor, I moved my barely used desktop into my bedroom. For reasons that I do not care to explain, I ended up hooking the PC in there to the 17'' monitor instead of in my living room that houses a 50'' plasma. This desktop is a pretty solid PC. good graphics card, proc, but more importantly, a 1TB hard drive. About a little over a year ago, I decided to put all my digital media that I have obtained on this hard drive. So, while we are in bed, we can have access to every television show and movie that I have on that computer using WMC for windows 7. Honestly, although it lacks some of the bells and whistles that it could have via plug ins, my biggest turn off for this program is the fact that audio syncing seems to be off at times. currently, I am checking out a number of other programs out there, but currently I am still on the hunt for the right one.
Forget the Keyboard and mouse! Although I do still have a wireless keyboard an mouse stowed away for when I actually want to treat my media center as the computer it was naturally put together as, I solved my problem by heading over to ebay and purchasing a cheap $10 USB remote control. It has more buttons than you will ever need which integrate with WMC exceptionally well.
Of course, my bedroom is not the only room in the house, and is certainly not the place I do most of my TV/Movie watching. In my living room, I have an Xbox 360 that is hooked up to my prized 50'' plasma TV.
There are a few ways that you can watch digital media on the xbox. I first tried the whole syncing the xbox media center to my desktop's media center. I was not a fan of this for very long, as I found that Xbox media center was very particular on which files it decided to be compatible with.
I solved this first by simply using the video library function under "My Xbox". After setting up my media hard drive as a shared drive on my desktop in the bedroom, I was able to browse and watch the videos on my xbox remotely. This worked quite well, and I was able to get some of the files to play that I was unable to do with the media center function.
I went even further my installing TVersity on my desktop. Tversity makes it a little easier for those who are not especially savvy with setting up shared folders in windows. With little configuration, it allows your xbox to see your media with ease, as well as gives you a few more bells and whistles like being able to watch youtube and hulu videos. TVersity also claims that videos will be encoded so that they will be compatible with xbox playback.
Either method, video playback quick and quality has not suffered a bit as long as you don't have your home networked bogged down by downloading or other bandwidth intensive activities.
All in all, I have said good bye to cable and I never plan on going back.