Cable Cutters: 18 Months Later

In November 2013, we decided to join the growing ranks of “cable cutters”, folks who no longer purchase cable TV through the traditional flat-rate subscription model.  Taking a look back 18 months later the results are pretty much what we expected: We've saved a lot of cash, watched higher quality programming than we likely would have otherwise, and lost the ability to talk about the latest TV commercials - because we simply don’t see them much anymore.

We had DirecTV with no sports package and no premium channels and were paying $100+/month. Today we use FREE Over The Air (OTA) digital TV (yes, it still exists you just need an antenna), TiVo, a Netflix Subscription and Amazon Video on Demand (we have Prime, so we get a fair amount of shows included at no extra charge). We pay an average of $56/month. We also added a Roku 3 to the mix, which has turned out to offer much better performance than the TiVo for streaming content.  It support Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and many other channels.  An excellent value at around $100.

The results: Over the first 18 months, we have saved just over $700, with an average savings of around $45/month.

Here’s the cool part, and what I was hoping to achieve by embarking on this experiment: our expense now varies month-by-month based on how much we watch, as it should.  When the kids are on break from school or we have downtime, we may watch more.  When we are too busy to watch TV, we watch less and we pay less.

My problem with the old model wasn't really with the expense. It’s the way the product is sold. Nobody needs or really wants 175+ channels of TV.  So why subsidize all that?  And why pay a provider for something that consists of approximately 33% ads that you don’t want to see?  Whether you watch them or not, if you have cable you are paying for ESPN, NFL Network and others which are built-in to your subscription fees.

It seems that we have known about the “really good” series and movies before they are released for on-demand viewing, saving us from wasting time watching potentially lower quality shows.  So we benefit from the thousands of people watching and providing feedback when these shows are originally broadcast, as well as suggestions from family and friends. The Wisdom of the Crowds certainly works especially well for the cable-cutter, but patience is required. Some content moves very quickly from broadcast TV to on-demand availability, and some takes a very long time for whatever reasons.  I’m sure there are a myriad of licensing and contractual issues at play, but it will be nice when things flow more quickly to being available on-demand.

We like sports, but very rarely sit down to watch an entire game all the way through.  We’re really satisfied with what is available OTA.  And while I originally thought we would want to record more stuff on the OTA networks like ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, etc. that has not turned out to be the case.

Also, while doing this analysis, I realized we have paid nearly $150 for the privilege of watching a relatively small handful of movies on DVD from Netflix.  Definitely time to turn that off. RedBox?

Our TiVo is typically 99% full and we just don’t watch those recorded shows much.  Maybe time for it to go, too...