30 Days without Cable!

So it has been 30 days without Cable.  Specifically, DirecTV.  So, what have I lost besides a $75 monthly bill?  What shows are unavailable?  What do the wife and kids think?  

"Rolling Old school with Lucy"

First, let me explain our current setup.  We have a 12 foot old school Radio Shack style antenna in the attic.  It pulls in our local channels nicely.  3, 9, 12, 23, 45, and 61.  We subscribe to Netflix, Hulu Plus and Pandora One.   A Roku, WD Live Media Hub, LG Blu-Ray player, Chumby and two PCs are in the home to serve up these services.  Finally, a RTC Internet connection at 25megs gets everything online.  It sounds confusing but setup and usage are all quite easy even for our 7 year old.

Here’s a list of disadvantages and advantages in the first 30 days:

Disadvantages:

•  Must switch between TV inputs to go from antenna to the Internet TV box.  It only takes 2 seconds but I’m lazy…ok?

"We listen to Pandora instead of XM on the TV"

• Click to content – It takes more button pushes to get to Internet TV content than traditional pay TV (For example, 10 button pushes and 60 seconds vs. 3 button pushes and 20 seconds to watch a show.  Multiply this by everything you search for a show and the time adds up.
•  National News – No Fox or CNN.  For example, one of my favorite news shows is ‘Special Report w/ Bret Baier”.  I can go to the foxnews website to get some of his interviews but it is not the full show rather clips of certain segments.
•  Weather – With traditional cable, we would go straight to the weather channel.  Now we use our mobile phones or get on a PC to check the website instead.  Both the Roku, WD Live Hub, and Chumby can easily get us weather information around the house.  It’s really just a different way to get the same information.
•  Sports – We are not big sports fans except college football.  The big games are usually on one of the major networks anyway which we can get over the antenna.  If not, we simply load up espn3 and watch the game over the Internet.  
•  DVR – I miss recording to the DVR from home and away then coming home to watch it at our convenience.  I became a self-proclaimed expert at skipping ads using the 30 second skip button on the remote control.  However, no longer.  Many of the shows we recorded are available on Hulu Plus.  So we can watch these on demand instead!  It isis like the Internet is the DVR instead.  You can’t skip the ads on Hulu but they are only 30 seconds of interruption anyway vs 3-4 minutes of irrelevance.
•  Reliability – There have been a few occasions where had to reboot a box due to a system freeze or dropping audio.  It hasn’t been a big issue as occasionally we would experience rain fade in a big storm with the Dish.



"hulu is like a DVR without having to DVR"

•  Change – This is a disadvantage only in that we have had to look in the mirror and change our old TV watching habits.  Seek out new sources of content and be willing to do things in a new way.   We all are resistant to change but some are more resistant than others.  Hey, resistance is futile ok?  Internet TV rocks.  After 30 days, we are starting to settle in and be ‘ok’ with the change but none of us are ‘Borg’ just yet.  The kids adapted in the first few days.  It took me a couple of weeks.  The wife watches very little TV and noticed she’s been watching mostly local stations off the antenna.  The cat?  No he doesn’t seem to notice but wouldn’t say if he did.  But he's probably 'Borg'.

"I watch too much Star Trek with my cat Nelson."

So, as you can see from the disadvantages, we have found solutions for most all of them.  If not, learning to live with them hasn’t been a big ordeal for us.


Advantages:

• Customized TV for our family – By queuing up content in Netflix, adding subscriptions within Hulu Plus, and creating channels within Pandora One, we have effectively created an entertainment experience designed just for us.  
•  Time Spent – Now that we are actively using the Internet for our entertainment and over the top applications to fill our content needs, I am finding that we are spending less time seeking content, watching junk content, and spending more time ‘offline’ together as a family.  For example,  the other day my daughter sat in my lap and we pulled up a show she’s been wanting to watch on Netflix.  So we dropped it in our queue from the PC .  Then, we went into the other room to sit on the couch together and watch it from Netflix.  After the show was over, we went outside for a while instead of watching endless TV shows and commercials.  None of us are ‘vegging’ out on the couch acting like potatoes.  With Internet TV, for us, it is get in get out go on to the next thing.
•   Savings – DirecTV was around $900 per year.  Netflix, Hulu, and Pandora One are $252 per year.  The $648 savings ($54/mo) can go towards more important things in our budget.  Any sacrifice we have made is more than made up by this savings every month.

In sum, we have done it for 30 days and won’t look back.  The content, technology, and ease of use are all getting easier all the time.  So if it is not right for you now, it is highly probable that at some point, it will be the time for you to switch too!  What is likely holding many of you back is content.  This is something I plan to address in the coming days.

For now, I will continue to evaluate the direction of Internet TV and provide insights to those of you that read the blog.  As always, stay tuned, thanks for reading!