Cutting the Cables

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The cable tele­vi­sion indus­try is bro­ken.  Cer­tainly, it’s not as bro­ken as the econ­omy (DOWee!), but it’s based upon a sin­gle log­i­cal fal­lacy, that view­ers watch chan­nels.  This is sim­ply not the case.  When is that last time you said, “I’m going to watch a lit­tle NBC”?  Peo­ple don’t say that; peo­ple say, “I’m going to watch America’s Got Tal­ent because it’s what I con­sider qual­ity pro­gram­ming.”  (Okay, maybe no one’s ever said that, but you see my point.)

It was, with this in mind, that I began a spread­sheet.  One by one, I searched out the shows we felt we must keep up with: Lost, The Office (the last episode of which had me in tears, I laughed so hard), Grey’s Anatomy, Jon & Kate + 8, Scrubs (if it has another sea­son), and Project Run­way (for Holli).  The goal was find legal, online ways to view all of our shows.  This mis­sion was made expo­nen­tially eas­ier by the net­works them­selves.  Both NBC and ABC offer full video ver­sions of some of their pop­u­lar shows online.  This means that, as long as what you watch is pop­u­lar, you can find your shows for free.

Unfor­tu­nately, there were two casu­al­ties to this process: Project Run­way and J&K+8.  For Project Run­way we’ve man­aged to find another, tem­po­rary solu­tion (and the show’s almost over any­way), but jayenkay­plusay seems to have no decent online pres­ence.  We’ve decided that we can pur­chase VHS tapes for Carol to use to tape the show for us.  How­ever, with us being short a VCR, this means we will only be able to watch the show when we’re there.  If any­one has any other ideas regard­ing this dilemma, please leave a comment.

EDIT: After doing some research for this post, I dis­cov­ered that TLC has added JK8 to their video library, boast­ing entire episodes of the lat­est sea­son until the end of Decem­ber.

After doing the research and adding up the poten­tial cost of this new method, we sat back in awe.  The results were astound­ing.  We dis­cov­ered that we could save around $37.90 a month by get­ting our tele­vi­sion online.  iTV was our winner.

It’s been two weeks since we made our choice, and so far it’s going well.  Also, we’ve been doing it a lot more.  And by “doing it” I mean read­ing, of course.  Holli has turned into a vora­cious reader, even though her work hours are get­ting closer and closer to full-time.  I split my time between read­ing, Half-Life 2, and programming/research.  It’s much qui­eter, and I feel bet­ter read­ing than I do watch­ing TV.  With all this new read­ing time, I have a goal to read and remove enough books from my “library” to allow us to get rid of a book­shelf.  There’s one shelf in par­tic­u­lar that could use a chucking.

If you’ve been con­sid­er­ing get­ting rid of TV, be ready to fill that time with some­thing.  Do some research to see if your “must have” shows have an online equiv­a­lent.  Our goal wasn’t to get our TV for free, but to get it online some­how.  Even if you have to pay $1.99 or $2.99 per episode, that cost will still be much lower than pay­ing for a full cable subscription.

Have any of you done this?  Do you have any tips for would-be switchers?

9 thoughts on “Cutting the Cables”

  1. you can get quite a few chan­nels in Sioux Falls for free over the air all you need is an antenna! Yea rab­bit years or does your tv not dummy down to air waves?

  2. The only thing I miss about cable tele­vi­sion right now is 1) we’re not using our nice TV for TV-watching (this will really hurt when it comes to LOST when we’re used to watch­ing it in HD — maybe by then we’ll decide to pick it up again) and 2) scared to death that some­one will talk about one of our shows before we’ve had a chance to see it (again, this will really hurt when it comes to LOST).

    But I have become a reader. Mar­riage has changed me.

  4. I know most major net­works do pro­vide online access to the most recent episodes of shows. I recently found out show­time has a you tube account where you can watch Dex­ter on. As far as find­ing all your shows online in an easy to view for­mat and high qual­ity I don’t think any­thing comes closer than hulu.com.

    I will tell you one think I can find much higher qual­ity HDTV rips ille­gally than I can find free ad sup­ported online TV shows. That in itself should be a sign that maybe what the TV stu­dios have to offer is just not enough to replace con­ven­tional TV yet. Then again that’s maybe exactly what they want, to pro­tect their mas­sive mul­ti­chan­nel rev­enue stream.

  6. I didn’t get rid of cable all together because I couldn’t get any­thing even with an antenna below the hill. But, I did make a con­scious deci­sion to get basic cable as a way to save a lit­tle dough. I save about $300 a year. My two faves aren’t on my chan­nels, but I’m able to watch them online too. If I think of it I set a timer at Mom’s and record them to VHS. Way to check things out, good think­ing. It really is amaz­ing what a lit­tle change can do.

  7. Funny story– because my cable, inter­net, and home phone are all a “one-wire” deal… it would cost me $10 MORE a month if I would can­cel cable and keep the other two services.

    Feel free to come over and watch John and Kate Plus 8 any­time. Now I know why we’re friends. Myzo!

  8. I started watch­ing my TV online this sum­mer. 1) I am cheap and don’t want to pay for the 40-some chan­nels I never watch. 2) I’m never home to watch my shows when they are on so I would end up watch­ing them online any­way. I just miss the news. My antenna doesn’t get the great­est recep­tion here in Ver­mil­lion and miss out on the Sioux Falls stations.

  9. I’m strongly con­sid­er­ing the exact same strat­egy as you took Miles (and Holli). I rarely watch any TV unless it is a sports game and I never watch TV shows unless I watch them on DVD. The only rea­son I would even buy a TV is to play video games, but I think that within a few years I will drop those to read even more than I already try to do.

    I fig­ured that out after hav­ing a TV sit­ting in my room for a year that was never actu­ally plugged in. It basi­cally just served as a taller enter­tain­ment stand. Con­se­quently, I decided that I would be much more inclined to read a book or spend time on the inter­net than I would be to watch TV.

    Also, depend­ing on the shelf you’d be elim­i­nat­ing, I would strongly con­sider tak­ing (or buy­ing) some of the books you are hop­ing to remove. Specif­i­cally, the rows and rows of Nancy Drew and Babysitter’s Club that you’ve col­lected over the years (Miles).

    But seri­ously, keep me in mind for the book dis­posal. And way to be a pio­neer in the “drop­ping cable for greener pas­tures” fron­tier. I appre­ci­ate the risk you’ve taken and plan to jump on the band(covered)wagon soon.