George Tuvell

Today, I officially dropped cable TV – for good.

The only reason I held onto my cable service over the past year was to watch sports (ESPN and college football), and some shows that my wife and I enjoy, such as bizarre foods (check it out) and Forensic Files, which were previously only available to us on the Travel Channel and TruTV.

The other perks of keeping our cable connection were that we had an HD DVR, so we could watch beautiful HD television, and record shows that we could watch whenever we got around to it.

All of this for about $55 per month…that’s with promotional pricing from RCN.

On top of our cable subscription we have 5mbps internet service that costs $35/mo…not bad, but also promotional pricing.

Now, it’s a major pet peeve of mine when money is unnecessarily spent. It drives me freakin crazy…and our cable bill was absolutely unnecessary: here’s why:

We have a mac-mini computer already connected (HDMI) to our Samsung 52″ HD TV. This provides access to all internet TV channels, along with access to our Netflix account for streaming movies. Nearly every TV series is available on-demand over the internet either via Hulu or Netflix ( we do pay $9.99 per month for Netflix but that includes unlimited streaming and DVD shipments) The  online quality is very good and getting better. Hulu already has streaming shows in HD format. And, we don’t need a DVR because we can just go online and watch the shows as they become available. Oh yea, and the guide, we don’t need that either. You can go to www.clicker.com and search for every show and locate it online.

With sports, ESPN streams many games, and Ohio State BigTen football fans like myself can order any game online for $2.99 on the bigtennetwork, or the game will be on standard local broadcast TV, which brings me to my next point.

What about our local channels? Well, we hooked up a standard indoor RCA antenna that picks up all local channels (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox and more…) and our TV displays them in beautiful High Definition without doing anything extra. (You must have an HD TV to do this). The antenna is small enough to sit behind the TV and is not visible. You can find out what kind of antenna you need based on where you live at antennaweb.org.

So, we now pay $35 per month for our internet connection, and we have High Definition local TV, all movies either via DVD or streaming online from Netflix, and all of our TV shows are either already on Hulu, or we can find them in 2 seconds by searching on clicker.com. For big sporting events they will likely be televised on local stations, I can buy them on-demand online, or drop by the sports bar where it’s more fun anyways…still beats throwing away another $55 per month on cable.

Cool, heh?

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