Dave Metzener's Weblog

I don’t know if this could be considered a New Years Resolution, but this household finally “cut the cord” from Cable and dropped our Cable Television subscription. We kept our Internet with our cable provider, but that’s all we are subscribed to.

Now, our Cable bill last year was $150 a month. That’s for Cable and Internet. So, after dropping Cable, I upped the Internet speed to 30Mbps from 15Mbps, since the price would be the same.

Now since we made this change, we haven’t missed any of the shows we normally watch. We watch them when we want to because we purchase episodes on iTunes, or watch them on Hulu.com.

I put together a spreadsheet of all the shows we watch each week, put the SD (Standard Definition) and HD (High Definition) prices in, decide what we would watch via iTunes and what we can watch on Hulu, and removed the prices we were not going to be purchasing on iTunes. We then decided on the shows that we wanted to watch in HD and remove the SD prices on those and the HD prices on the rest.

The totals were pretty surprising. We are paying about $12 a week on those shows we purchase on iTunes. Hulu is $7.99 a month. So, $50 a month for iTunes and $8 a month for Hulu. Compared to $100 a month with Cable, that’s $600 a year instead of $1,200 a year and we get to keep the shows we pay for instead of just watching them once.

To be fair, there were a few up front purchases to make this transition. An AppleTV ($99) to get the iTunes purchased shows on the HD Television. I also purchased a Digital Television Antenna ($36). Fortunately, we have a Playstation 3 so we can watch Hulu on the PS3 as well as watch Blu-ray and regular DVD’s. Overall, not a huge deal. Just a month and a half of the old Cable bill.

Now I do have a MacBook computer that I was using to watch iTunes shows, but the computer is pretty old (5+ years) and Hulu was just not working well on it. At the time that I was evaluating Hulu with the MacBook, there wasn’t a Hulu app for the PS3, so decisions were made then that Hulu was a bad call to pay the monthly fee. Later, the PS3 wasn’t really able to stream Hulu wirelessly very well. I have now run Cat-5 cables from the Cable Modem to the Home Entertainment system so that streaming Hulu isn’t an issue anymore.

I’ll post an update of our experiences with this process in about a month to see how well we are doing.