In Cutting the Cord, Step Three I found that I can cut the
cable cord and still watch new episodes for 5 of the 12 cable TV programs I
like to watch using the Hulu Plus service for $7.99/mo. (a digital TV antenna
is able to score me ALL 13 of the over-the-air shows I watch.) The user experience won’t be ideal, but it
will work.
We also learned in the previous article that new episodes of
shows aired by the Discovery Channel and the History Channel are particularly
hard to come by unless you purchase the shows using Amazon or iTunes.
In my on-going example I will save $74.01/mo. by cutting the
cord versus subscribing to cable TV service if I install a digital TV antenna
and pay $7.99/mo. for Hulu Plus. This
gets me 18 of the 25 TV programs I like to watch.
But what about those last 7 shows? They are:
American Pickers (Discovery)
Deadliest Catch (Discovery)
Falling Skies (TNT)
Gold Rush (Discovery)
Mythbusters (Discovery)
Pawn Stars (History)
Survivorman (Discovery)
I have a few options:
(1) I can stop watching these shows, or I can wait a year or two for the
seasons to appear on Netflix or on Hulu.
(2) I can buy/rent episodes on a per-episode basis for $2.99 each using
iTunes. (3) I can subscribe to a season
pass for each show on iTunes at a cost of $20-$38 per season pass, depending on
the show.
If I buy season passes for all 7 shows, it will cost me
about $215 a year. My current cable bill
savings without subscribing to these 7 shows is about $888 a year. This means that I can still save about $673
per year by cutting the cable cord – and I still get to watch new episodes of
all 25 of my favorite programs. Looking
at it another way, that’s a savings of about $56/mo. over my current cable bill
to get the same programming I currently watch.
To play with the numbers a different way, I currently pay
about $82/mo. for cable TV service (excluding internet); if I cut the cable
cord (retaining high-speed internet only) I will pay about $26/mo. for the
programming I actually watch -- a savings of about 68%.
Is saving $56/mo. worth it to me? What inconveniences might I experience? What
else might I lose by ditching cable?
Next Article:
Potential Pitfalls of Ditching Cable
Previous Article: Getting Cable TV Shows Without Subscribing toCable TV
