The End of Cable TV?
- March 24, 2007
- 5 comments
Patrick Crowley decided he’d drop cable TV from his list of monthly bills. It ended up saving him about $750 a year. That’s not chump change, so I decided to do the math and see how much I could save by dropping cable TV.
We spend about $130/month for cable TV and Internet with Time/Warner Cable. That’s $1560 a year! That’s not even their über-plan. We don’t have HBO or any other “premium” channels. It’s just basic digital cable with a DVR box. Part of that cost is shared by my cousin, but she only pays for half of the cable TV service. I pay for the Internet service since I use it about 1,239,824 times more than she does and can write it off as a business expense. The cable TV service per month comes out to about $88/month or $1056/year. My share of that is $44/month, $528/year.
We switched to a DVR back in December for a few reasons, but the main ones were that we could watch our favorite shows whenever we wanted, skip over ads and pause TV if we needed to answer the phone or something. And the DVR has been great for that, but after reading about Patrick’s decision and his logic behind it, I’m thinking of ditching cable TV too.
There are only a handful of shows that I like and regularly watch. I can find most of them on iTunes. A season pass for a show costs anywhere between $24 -$45. After adding up the cost of season passes on the shows I watch, it comes out to about $150/year. That’s substantially lower than cable TV. Plus it’s even better than DVR. I don’t even have to worry about skipping over ads. There are no ads. The shows are widescreen and are near high-definition. High-definition video will be available eventually I’m sure.
The only thing keeping me from completely dropping cable TV immediately is I don’t have a way to watch iTunes content on my TV. I’ve read some reviews of the AppleTV, but none of them are gushing over it. Plus it only lets you watch iTunes content. And with a $300 price tag, it’s just not worth it. A Mac mini is another option, but $600 is a boatload of money to spend just so I can watch downloaded content on my TV.
Using Connect360, I can watch WMV movies from my Mac on my Xbox 360, but that’s it. There’s no way for the 360 to show iTunes content. Surely there’s some skilled hacker or engineer out there that can figure out a solution? Being able to watch iTunes content with my 360 would be the best solution, so I guess I’m going to have to wait on dropping cable TV until it’s possible.
Shawn Blower
March 25, 2007
Andy
March 25, 2007
Wow… wasn’t aware that cable costs so much in the US. Here it is 21 CHF which by today’s FX rate is 17.24 USD. We just switched to TV over VDSL which gives me more channels in German and English plus the TiVo or DVR like settop box which is very easy to program online and pay-per-view videos (up to 3.50 CHF / 2.87 USD per movie) and all that for only 25 CHF / 19.70 USD per month.
ADSL/VDSL costs are similar though: 69.00 CHF / 56.63 USD for the second fastest connection which is 3500kb/s down and 300kb/s up. However since a week or so my VDSL connection is giving me around 5400kb/s down and 440kb/s up which I can’t complain about.
Total costs per year would be: 1128.00 CHF / 925.74 USD except the management company for the apartment building includes basic cable into our rent and told us they couldn’t cancel it because they had a contract for the whole building and not per apartment. So in reality we are paying 1380 CHF / 1132.55 USD per year. I love the DVR though… no more channel surfing – I now only watch what I really want to.
I’d go for the AppleTV, Chris.
In my case, I have a big 23in Cinema Display… so I didn’t need to worry about connecting to a television.
So maybe AppleTV is a bit pricey at $300, but that’s a one-time charge. Too, there seem to be an increasing number of hacks for the AppleTV (more media types, applications, etc.), so I’d imagine it will become more and more useful over time.
I pay $36.04 a month for satellite and I only watch maybe 5 or 6 channels out of the 100 or so that we get. If they would let you choose what channels you want and then you just pay for each channel, that would be MUCH better. People would save so much money.
So, for one year of satellite, it’s $432.48. I also get Netflix, so for one year of that, it’s $114.36. But, since you also included your internet into the equation, I will too. For one year of internet, it’s $335.40 bringing my total for all three to $882.24. Still cheaper than yours. Hee-hee.