Cutting the cord on cable TV: Personal experience

Nielsen Ratings released their latest report on TV consumption in America, and found that 5 million people in the United States no longer subscribe to cable TV or broadcast TV, up from 2 million in 2007.  While this is an incredibly smaller percentage, I (and my family) are one of those.  In fact, I have several friends who have made this switch as well.

wsj.com

Does this say something about the Lawrence, Kansas market?  Quite possibly, because the only cable provider in town, Knology (previously Sunflower, and recently purchased by WOW) is a horrible service, expensive, and unreliable at best.  AT&T Uverse is possible in some locations of town, but not in mine.

The question here is how is my experiment proceeding, and how did I get to this?  From my recollection, we are going on close to five years without cable TV subscritpion.  Do not mistake this: we still get our entertainment, just not through the subscription cable TV offerings.  Six years ago I bought my first flat screen, hi-def TV: a 32 inch LCD.  We had basic, low-res cable at the time, however with this new device I went all in: HDMI cables with the full range of hi-def, digital cable TV and surround sound playing from a stereo receiver.  And it was good.

And yet, one year later, with a cable/internet bill that approached $150 per month, we decided to unload the cable TV, and $86 from our monthly bill.  I know some people who routinely pay over $200 per month for their combined service, so we were definitely in the middle when it came to packaged services.  And yet... we found that we rarely watched the television.  From my point of view, a family who works, kids in school, you calculate the number of visible hours for TV.  Five days a week, from 6:00pm to 10:00pm is 20 hours per week.  Weekends you would get 14 hours a day, so 28 hours a weekend.  That's 48 hours of total viewing ability per week.

When we looked at our viewing record, we really found that we only watched a handful of regular shows, and for the most part, simply turned on the TV for background noise, not really watching.  Of course there were the lazy moments when we would turn it on just to see if we could find something.  But we found a solution to that as well.  In our case, this was money wasted.  We did not watch 48 hours per week.  In reality, we probably watched about 10 to 15, with another 10 to 15 of just random surfing or background noise.

Here is the justification of why we switched off cable:  Since we already have an internet connection, there is no additional money spent.  Instead of the $86 per month, we can spend $8 for Netflix, $8 for Hulu Plus, and find the remaining things online for free.  That's a savings of $70 just in that.  When we really looked at it, there were only a handful of shows that we routinely watched, several of which we can find online.  The kicker is that we can watch them on our own schedule (it does not have to be Tuesdays at 8:00pm), and we can watch re-runs at our leisure.  That's not possible with cable TV (unless you spend extra for the DVR or OnDemand).  Plus there are several free online services out there as well: ESPN3 comes to mind for many events.  During the summer I subscribe to MLB.TV for baseball, and have considered FoxSoccer so I can watch the European football leagues.  Both combined still are less per month than the old cable bill.

This also leaves us the ability to rent a movie if we cannot find it on one of the two online services we currently have.  Plus, we can run these on the computer in the living room, on the PS3, on the iPad, or any of our laptops, sitting in any room or outside, or in a hotel, in a lobby... anywhere there is a network.  You cannot take your cable TV to Panera or Starbucks and catch up on an old episode of Faulty Towers... but I can on my laptop whenever I want.

So from our perspective, cutting the cable and finding alternatives saves us money, allows freedom, and also gives us the peace of mind that we do not need background noise (though we do turn on Netflix sometimes, and run Disney, or Discovery Channel shows like we used to with cable).

However, this is not for everyone.  My intent was not to indicate that I am a better person for doing this.  There are plenty of things that I miss, and I am certainly not one for sitting at the TV for hours and watching shows.  My attention span is not that great.  But if you need to save some money, and would untie yourself from the TV, this could be the way to go.  And when the day comes where cable companies allow complete a la carte programming, our family will probably supplement our internet with a few channels.  I still have issues with paying for 200 channels, when all I want is about 15.  I understand their arguments, but it does not work for me.  You want Disney? Fine.  But you will also get Disney Jr., MTV Hits, MTV Jams, Bloomberg, DIY, H2, G4, Military History, LifeTime Real Women, Biography, CMT Pure Country, Boomerang, Chiller, Cooking, Crime&Investigation, Discovery Fit&Health, GSN, Sleuth, Style, WE, VH1 Soul and VH1 Classics.  Yes, that's only $10 (at my local cable provider, but I am sure there are similar packages out there in your town) for 23 channels.  But this is such a random selection of channels... there are two channels in that group we would watch.  That is one-eleventh of the channels... I should only have to pay $0.90 for those two channels.

Now I have gotten off onto a tangent for another posting.  Anyway... the cable cutting has worked for us through supplementing things that we want to watch, saved us money, and given us flexibility that we could not find in cable TV.  I would be interested to know if you have cut the cord, how this has worked out for you, if you could not do it, or if you have questions on how you might do it.