For the past year we’ve been on a deal that had our cable bill at about $50 a month. I knew that the deal we had was gonna expire soon but couldn’t remember when. Last week our latest bill came in the mail and low and behold it was now $70 a month for cable. My immediate reaction was that that was a ton of money and we needed to think about if we should continue to have cable. I think nicole had the same reaction at the higher sticker shock and we agreed that at $70 continuing to keep cable was a waste of money considering how much we really used it. Yes we watch TV every night but honestly almost all of what we really want to watch is on the broadcast stations which we could just be getting for free. Also a big factor is that I no longer see cable as a necessity that I once saw it 5-10 years ago. Internet is a necessity but cable isn’t anymore since right now the content on tv isn’t all that great and you can get a lot of it legally for free off the internet.
On tuesday Nicole called Comcast (since it’s in her name) to go ahead and cancel our service. In the process of canceling they offered to cut our bill to $40 in order to keep us as customers. Nicole said yes since we would still be able to cancel later on if we wanted to. Since we were considering canceling at $70 a month for cable we have the same delema but with a $40 price point.
Our options if we dropped cable would be to switch to OTA and buy a DTV box so our tivo can get the digital signal or go with the internet streaming approach and turn off the tivo too. The streaming approach for me sounds very appealing since now days you can pretty much get any mainstream show you want legally. You can either go to the website of the broadcast company or places like hulu.com. The quality is pretty good and in my opinion is about comparable to the analog signal we’re watching now. The major flaw with this is that you need a computer setup that connects to the tv. Which we already have and I can use pretty easily but Nicole isn’t familiar with it and I don’t think she’s all that comfortable with the hoops you have to go through to access the online content.
So we’re either gonna keep cable at our now discounted $40 a month, buy a DTV box for ~$100 and go OTA, or just use our internet connection and stream tv shows over the internet. I’ve left it up to nicole to choose since she is writting her theis and really is the main one using the tv/cable right now.
