Exploring Cord Cutting

You could call this "an encore article"...originally published in October of 2013!

Every now and again someone I know asks me questions about my Adventures in Cord Cutting, which goes back a bit. So I get to haul out and link the same old blog post from 2013, on a blog site I don't maintain anymore. So I thought I'd update it a bit (edits in Italics) and hopefully not lose much of the good stuff...

Back in September (2013) we finally did it...we called Cox and canceled our $130 per month service. I thought I’d take some time to detail and describe how we’re doing without cable and it’s endless supply of programming...   

We’ve been flirting with the cord-cutting concept since December of 2011 when we bought our first Roku 2 XS box for $100. At first, it was enough to rent movies via Amazon Video On Demand. At this time also, we began cataloging what shows we watch(ed) on the various cable networks, so we could begin to find alternate ways to watch those shows. Some TV networks are more available than others, so it’s important to think this through in advance and see what is available outside of the cable bundle.

These days, we have 2 Roku (Rokai?) units -- the old original is now attached to the game room TV and the Roku 3 is on the main TV. To keep things clear, I'm only including the cost of one Roku below.

Caveat: I’m not that much of a religious TV viewer. I have a few shows I follow, but by and large, my wife is the Alpha consumer in our house. As a student of pop culture, we’ve often joked that this degree program offered at Syracuse University is tailor-made for her. She remains the toughest critic of this experiment.

So I bought an RCA ANT751R HD antenna for the top of the house and routed it’s signal to a splitter to feed all our household coax outlets. This cost $24.98 via Amazon.com at the time, although I would shop around...the price is now between $42--75! We are 17 miles from our transmitter cluster -- thanks to my iPhone compass, I pointed this antenna at 119 degrees SE, and got almost every Over The Air channel that’s available in our area. Our house in midtown is high up, on the highest "hill" near 21st & Lewis, and having the unit on the very peak of the roof was fortuitous. Now, we're down near the riverbank at 102nd & Riverside, and our line of sight means the signal is not as prime.

Knowing our schedules with dinner and getting our 11-year old home from gymnastics, fed and ready for bed, we agreed a DVR would be essential after I turned in our old one back to Cox. So I bought a refurbished Tivo Premiere for $68 -- this model accepts over the air TV signals. Coupled with the $14.99 per month Tivo service, it does a pretty good job for us, and I remotely schedule programs from work via the web or from the iPhone app. Plus, the Tivo DVR interface is hands-down better than the offerings that Cox offers.

NOTE: this particular Tivo unit does have a variety of on-demand services built-in (Amazon Video on Demand, Netflix, Hulu Plus, YouTube, etc.), but the responsiveness of the remote to the unit is painfully slow. We regularly swap over to the Roku on Video 2 instead.

Setup costs (one time)

• Tivo Premiere             $68.00
• RCA HD Antenna       $24.98
• Roku 3                 $65.00 (a steal when they were being phased out)

                              $157.98

Ongoing monthly costs

• Tivo service              $14.99
• Netflix                       $10.99
• Hulu Plus                    $7.99
• SlingTV Orange $20.00
• Amazon Prime           $8.29

                               $62.26

So with the DVR basics handled, next we began to see what was where in the Land of Streaming. Some shows we watch are on Netflix, and some are on Hulu Plus. I was surprised how many of our regular things are on Hulu Plus, delayed by a day. Not a big deal to me, but for some in the house, who access multiple screens to talk about shows in real-time, a problem...

Playon.tv is an interesting add-on we’re playing with. It’s a software package that runs on a Windows PC somewhere on your home network and acts as a conduit between plugins for various networks and their web streaming. It’s just different enough from Roku’s lineup to warrant the cost -- it gives us selected shows from HGTV, Lifetime, History Channel, Food Network, to name a few. We opted for a lifetime license for this when it was offered, but we've largely killed it from our use as more shows are directly streamable...not to mention SlingTV (below) now has all these networks. Also, it required a Windows host on your local network to stream to/from, and I hated having to have that PC on, just humming away.

In addition to the ongoing monthly costs, we round out our viewing with a healthy dose of shows and movies purchased via Amazon Video on Demand. Things like “Walking Dead,” “American Horror Story,” “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.” Don’t judge. These go for $1.99 per episode (non HD), which brings our average monthly television viewing cost up to $70 on average. Still cheaper than our Cox Cable bundle, and we don’t feel we suffer....much.

The one casualty? Random channel surfing, and mindlessly landing on “Sixteen Candles” whenever it happens to be on. We have to be more deliberate about seeking out our entertainment. Tivo tries to help by suggesting and recording things, but our Over The Air options are pretty limited in scope. In our market, it appears that half the OTA channels are Spanish or Religious programming (sometimes both!). The odds of “Sixteen Candles” showing up there are pretty slim.

I can now strikeout that entire earlier paragraph: with SlingTV Orange ($20/mo., feeds up to 2 devices simultaneously), I now have a boatload of those networks and channels that used to suck me in mindlessly on a Saturday afternoon. SlingTV will even let me log in over their Windows app, their iPad app, etc. The catch is only 2 devices at a time. Which is fine. And more ESPN and FoodNetwork than I can take!

I secretly wondered if, with more speed bumps on our easy access to things we’d either seen before or didn’t need to waste our time with, I’d return to reading more. Or learn to play the Ukulele. But the big box against the wall is a jealous mistress. With all the furniture in the “TV room” oriented towards that smooth glass shrine, it’s hard to look away even for a minute...