Cancel Cable and Save with Free Internet TV

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.