Cheaper to Keep Her (Arsenic.net)

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Cheaper to Keep Her

Posted January 15, 2007

We've set up a chart to control Evan's TV watching and Wii playing. Today's day one, and he had used up his "credits" by 10 a.m., so it was a long afternoon in our house.

It got me thinking about TV and cable. We're paying about $60 a month for our cable - including basic cable, digital cable, HD channels and a DVR. I wonder if there are alternate, legal methods for watching our shows (BitTorrent isn't an option, sorry). If we lived in a city where we could get OTA HD or any over the air channels, this would be a different story and the cable would be gone, but we live in nowheresville, signal-wise, so we're stuck.

Here's a listing of some of the shows I/we watch regularly:

How I Met Your Mother - Available Free Online
Numb3rs - Available Free Online
Heroes - Availble free online or in iTunes
Studio 60 - iTunes
Lost - Availble free online or in iTunes
24 - iTunes
The Office - iTunes
Scrubs - iTunes

So, for the sake of argument, let's say the 4 shows in iTunes have 4 episodes a month. At $1.99 each, that comes out to $8 per show a month, or $32 each month to watch our shows. Keep in mind this is only for the 4 shows we can't get for free online. So by switching to just watching shows online, we'd be saving about $30 a month, or about $360 a year (actually about $60 in year one after getting an AppleTV to watch the shows on our HD set).

We also have the option of renting TV seasons through Netflix. They have an extensive library of shows and seasons of current TV shows come out usually before the next season starts.

The thing that isn't as readily available online is sports. We get CBS, TNT, HDNet, Fox Sports and ESPN in HD. Sports in HD is AWESOME. I see the NHL is putting games in Google Video but it isn't the same.

Any thoughts or ideas?

Posted by Mike at January 15, 2007 5:35 PM | Add to del.icio.us

Comments

Keep in mind also that your shows don't run all year long--so you'd save even more in summer and whatnot. The way I see it, you'd save closer to 500 per year.

That's enough to cover most of Evan's Easy Mac and chocolate pudding habit.

Posted by: jerry at January 15, 2007 10:53 PM