Cutting The Cable: Leaving Satellite & Cable TV Behind (part I)

When I first heard about people leaving cable TV behind for internet programming it was 2010 and I thought they lost their minds. One family's decision to cut the cable was based on their need to restructure their family's budget and cut unnecessary costs to save money.  They laid all of their bills out on the table and discussed whether or not and how they could lower each individual bill. When they came to their cable bill (one of their larger bills) they both agreed that it was more of a luxury than a necessity so they made the bold move to completely kill their cable service. To compensate for the loss of cable programs they came up with a plan to keep their broadband service and use the internet to watch movies and TV programs.

The pros and cons were immediately acknowledged, instead of a cable bill somewhere in the neighborhood of $85+/month they now only paid a fraction of that for the internet and if they wanted to watch movies they used services like Redbox or Netflix and and to catch their favorite TV shows they used Hulu plus. Their monthly costs were still significantly less than what they were paying for cable. One of the down sides of choosing to cut cable is that some networks weren't playing nice with the internet and wouldn't license any of their programs to be watched on services like Hulu, which meant that they would miss certain shows.

Here we are four years later and it seems like more people are fed up with satellite & cable TV and are leaving in droves; and the internet is accepting them with open arms making their transition as smooth as a baby's bottom. I happen to be one of those people. Tired of the high premiums and thousands of channels that showed the same old movies, we cut the cable two years ago and haven't looked back ever since.
Initially when we cut the service there was an unsettling silence as if to say, "what have we done?" However, soon after cutting the cable we found the silver lining on the dark discontinued service cloud, which was free over the air (OTA) high-definition (HD) channels.

My main concern wasn't missing out on the latest episode of my favorite reality show, instead I was really concerned with not being able to watch the news in real time in case of severe weather warnings. That changed the day we bought HD antennas for our televisions. The moment we connected the antennas and configured the television sets to scan for channels we were enjoying free OTA channels in beautiful uncompressed HD! I don't mean a measly two or three channels -- I'm talking about 30+ channels!  The OTA channels we receive are both from regular networks like FOX and independent networks like Bounce. Although some networks have come to their senses and embraced the internet allowing companies like Amazon and Hulu to show their shows, others are still stuck in the dark ages of television and refuse to allow their shows to be shown on the internet, but this is no longer a problem as web entities such as Hulu, Amazon, Netflix, and pretty soon Yahoo (just to name a few) begin producing their own original shows which have proven to be big successes -- ahem 'Orange is The New Black' anyone. Long gone are the days of being held captive by cable and satellite TV companies with their ridiculously high prices, lack of incentives for old customers, and horrible customer service. Goodbye cable, hello internet!

In the next segment I'll share how to cut the cable and never look back.