Saving Money – How We Cut the Cable Cord

Posted by On May 09, 2014 0 Comment

Before I start, I will give a caveat to this article; my wife and I are not really sports people, so I’m not sure how much we would or wouldn’t miss on the sports front by cutting the cord, so keep that in mind when reading this post.

It all started this past October when our cable ‘promo’ rate finally expired and there wasn’t a better deal they could give us; our cable bill just got out of control at that point. We were spending close to $200 for cable, internet, and phone and it just didn’t seem worth it. I work full time and mom and baby are at home so there isn’t a whole lot of time to watch TV, plus is it just me or is there never anything on? We’d always end up watching re-runs of friends or something like that (which we already own most of on DVD already.) When the baby went to bed we wanted to unwind and catch up on some of our favorite shows, so we certainly didn’t want to just cut out TV watching entirely, but we knew something had to change. Keri was now a stay at home mom so we were already looking at our budget pretty closely, and spending $200 on tv was definitely at the top of our chopping block.

So off to the phone we went, we called our cable company and asked for a better deal, but with no other direct competition for us to turn to we didn’t really have a leg to stand on to argue leaving as a subscriber. Since that didn’t work, we investigated our options to just cut the cable cord altogether.

Here is a rundown of the equipment we bought and use now, I’ll go into each of them briefly to explain how we use it and how it works for us:

Roku BoxRoku Box (Cost: $50 – $90 depending on which box you choose.)- This is the brains of our operation. Everything we do goes through the Roku box, which makes the whole setup simple and easy to use.

  • If you’re not familiar with the Roku box, it’s just a small box that plugs right into your tv and uses a wifi internet connection to be able to access tons of different “channels” from movies to music. It has some of it’s own roku specific features, but you can think of it as the device that organizes all of the stuff you watch in one easy to use place.
  • The Roku has a media player plugin to let us access our My Cloud Storage (see below), but we like to use Plex (see below) which has a nicer interface to browse through our movies and tv shows.
  • There are also a bunch of other free channels that give you access to tv shows and movies for free. AOL recently just released some movies from Miramax on their roku channel and plan to continue offering up free movies periodically.
  • Roku has M-GO, which is an on demand new movie selection – although you have to pay for the movies on here (the first two are free) it’s just like the on demand feature from your regular cable provider.
  • Other channels we use on the Roku that I discuss below are Aereo, Netflix, and Amazon. These three channels make up the bulk of our viewing so I’ll talk about each separately.

Aereo TVAereo – (Cost: $8 – $12/ month depending on storage and if you want to be able to record on one or two antennas)

  • Although it’s only available in select cities, Boston being one of them, it’s a great addition if you have regular broadcast TV shows that you like to watch. You may have heard about Aereo because they are currently battling their business model in the supreme court. In a nutshell Aereo rents you a tiny antenna that captures free over the air signals that you could get if you put an antenna on your house yourself, and allows you to access your personal antenna through a personal cloud dvr recording. Since it’s free over the air signals, you can get all of the standard broadcast channels like cbs, nbc, fox, etc… so you can still see all of your regular TV shows.

 

Netflix Video StreamingNetflix (Cost: $8/ month)

  • Netflix streaming has hundreds of tv shows and movies to watch including their own original TV series. It definitely has enough content and updated content to keep you busy for a while even if you watch a lot of TV.

 

 

 

 

Plex Media ServerPlex Media Server (Cost: free)

  • This is software that gets installed on your computer and allows you to stream videos from your computer to your TV. We use it to connect our My Cloud to the Roku to watch our DVD collection on TV.

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon Instant VideoAmazon Instant Video (from Amazon Mom aka Amazon Prime) (Cost: $99 for new subscribers, but we signed up for Amazon Mom initially for diapers, wipes, and baby related stuff, so this was an added perk)

  • Similar to Netflix, there are hundreds of tv shows and movies to watch. Our current favorite to watch on here is Macguyver. Such a great show.

 

 

 

Western Digital My Cloud StorageWestern Digital My Cloud Hard Drive (Cost: $150 – $220. It varies based on the amount of storage you want)

  • This is an external ‘cloud’ hard drive that can appear right on your roku box. We use it to store all of our DVDs in one place so it’s easier to access and avoids the need to own a dvd player anymore.

 

 

 

 

Google ChromecastChromecast (Cost: $35)

  • We got this to make it easier to stream shows directly from the Internet to the TV. Watch Youtube? Have access to ABC Family, USA, or other network TV station? It works great for that. It is also very similar to the roku in terms of watching netflix, etc…

 

 

 

 

 

Ooma Telo Telephone ServiceOoma Telo (Cost: $120 but we got it on sale around the holidays)

  • If you like to have a land line phone, the Ooma Telo is a great device. You pay for the device up front, and might be able to find it on sale. Then all you have to do is pay regulatory fees each month which amounts to about $3/ month. You can transfer your current phone number, or if you don’t mind changing it, it’s much quicker to just set it up with a new number.

 

 

 

 

So that’s all of the devices we use and we can watch everything we want. I also own a logitech harmony smart remote and an A/V receiver which makes it easy to listen to music, watch tv, flip to my Chromecast, or turn on our Wii (for all that exercising I’m doing) at the push of a button, but those aren’t necessary components to make the setup work, just nice to haves.

So far we’ve made it on this setup for about 6 months and I haven’t missed anything. It was a little bit of an upfront cost for everything, but it has already paid itself back in our monthly savings. The biggest adjustment that we had to make is that TV watching is now a more active experience. You can’t just sit there and let the TV drone on and on for hours to whatever program happens to come on next. You have to actively pick a show or movie you want to watch, and when it’s over, it stops. It doesn’t automatically start playing the next thing. I think this is actually a good thing because you can tend to get sucked into the couch easier if it just plays non-stop. You will probably end up watching less TV and find other more productive ways to spend your time, especially now this it’s coming in to nicer weather.