Cutting the cord? What does that mean?
Cutting the cord is all the rage these days. If you aren’t already in the know, you’re probably asking asking yourself: “What cord? What does that mean?” The cord-cutting trend refers to people who are canceling their cable television subscriptions. They’re using the Internet to stream their favorite TV shows, news, movies-anything they would have watched via their cable provider.
One of the big reason is cost savings. What’s the deal with all of these hidden fees? With everything bundled together, figuring out what you’re really paying for is next to impossible. And if you’re trying to save money, blowing $150 plus per month on phone, subpar Internet, and cable channels you may not even watch is is just to much. It certainly was for us.
We Said “Bye-Bye” To Cable
Yep! Your friends here at The Nerd Garden jumped on this band wagon just a few months ago. Before we took the plunge, however, took some time to think about it. Here’s how our process went:
- We pulled out our cable bills, reviewed the cost-per-month, and determined what our saved would be if we nixed our cable contract.
- We made a list of all the channels we’d like to have access to.
- We tracked everything we watched for a month, noting any shows that were on cable.
- Because our cable bill was bundled, we also checked our landline use to determine if we needed one.
- Finally, we researched Internet providers and found one that would offer us an Internet-only package.
When it was all said and done, Steph and I found that we really didn’t watch much TV at all. Sure, we like to watch shows but mostly we found ourselves binge watching an entire season of a show on Netflix. Our kids have similar TVviewing habits. They watch Netflix or Amazon, because it’s immediately available to them. So for us, it didn’t make sense to keep paying that pricey cable bill each month.
We Got a Roku
What really got us thinking about kicking cable to the curb? The Roku device. Roku is a media streaming device that takes content from the Internet and displays it on your television. It has thousands of different “channels.” Some are paid and require a cable subscription. Others are free.
We set ours up to stream from Netflix, Amazon, and our home PlexMedia server. The PlexMedia server streams all of our videos that we’ve ripped from DVDs. Don’t worry-we’ll be talking about PlexMedia in a future post.
Regardless of the source of the content, the Roku provided us with a single dashboard for accessing all of this content. Sweet! So, we went ahead and just did it.
Life After Cord-Cutting
Netflix and Amazon video still keep us entertained (mostly), but there are some things that we still miss. Like all the Christmas movies on the Hallmark channel. Um, I mean Steph is going to miss those movies. I’m going to miss watching Hockey!
Bring On The Rabbit Ears
No, not really, but we did travel back in time in a Delorean and hooked up an antenna. Well, not that far back. This is an HD antenna which will pick up our local channels in HighDef. If you are near a major city, you should be able to pick up all of the big networks and some other channels for free over the air.
Win! I got back coverage on my local sports teams! But there were still some of the old favorite cable channels that we couldn’t get, such as HGTV, History Channel, Hallmark, etc. So, we set out to see if we can get those.
Paid Streaming Services
There are a number of paid streaming services that we found on Roku, that will allow you to watch some of those channels. We tried out both SlingTV and the newer service, PlayStation Vue. While SlingTV did not even load for us, we did sign up for PlayStation Vue. It’s a good service that allowed us to watch some of our favorite shows at a fraction of what we were paying for cable. However, the menu isn’t intuitive and the DVR service is still faulty. Think the end of your favorite show getting cut off. We’ve dropped both of these for now, but may try them out in the future.
This solution is not perfect-especially, if you are used to having cable with DVR (along with all the other bells and whistles). We are still on the look out for replacing some of our missing channels, but overall we’ve not really missed ditching the cable all that much and have certainly saved a bit of money by cutting the cord.
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