How I Ditched Cable TV

I've though a lot over the past few years about how to get rid of cable (or satellite) television while still keeping a reasonable amount of entertainment available. This month I received yet another cable bill for almost $180 (tv, phone and internet combined) and finally decided to make a change. This is actually a great time to make this move as there are now some really good products and services available to ease the pain of losing a few hundred channels.

The first thing I did was discuss with my wife which shows are important to us. I mostly watch documentaries on NatGeo or the History Channel. My wife watches things like Dancing with the Stars. And together we enjoy various programs like 30 Rock and The Office. I quickly realized that very few of the shows we like require cable or satellite service. Netflix has a great selection of the documentaries that I like. My wife's shows as well as the shows we watch together are on broadcast television. All I needed to do was pull some resources together to make these shows available without a monthly cable bill.

We don't use our home phone much so canceling this along with cable TV service was not a problem. Removing these two services cut our Comcast bill from $180 to $65 for a monthly savings of $115. But making our shows available without cable TV required a few purchases. Here's a summary of what I bought:

• To grab over-the-air high definition TV signals from local channels I bought the Antennacraft® HDX1000 Amplified HDTV Antenna from Radio Shack for $80. This is an amplified directional antenna so you should point it toward a major metropolitan area which offers a lot of channels. Consult Antennaweb.org to find out what channels are near you.
• Although not a requirement I really wanted to be able to pause live TV as I could with my cable box. So I bought a used Tivo Series 3 HD DVR on Craigslist for $75. This isn't Tivo's newest box but it has a great interface and provides 2 weeks of programming guides for the channels I get via the antenna. It also lets me enjoy Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand and the Pandora music service. These 3 services give us a lot of options for movie rentals and music which we gave up when we canceled cable TV. I use the Tivo on our basement TV where we usually watch movies together.
  
• My final purchase was a $99 Roku XDS. The Roku also provides Netflix, Amazon and Pandora services as well as a bunch of other channels which can be added. Many are free but some do require a subscription. I installed the Roku on our upstairs TV which doesn't have a Tivo so that we could stream movies and music on that floor if desired.

This installation of the antenna was pretty straight-forward. I scouted the install location first and was happy to find that I could re-use existing coax cable from the unused satellite dish mounted on the side of my house. I pre-assembled the antenna which made the mounting much easier. It came with all the screws and connectors needed along with good instructions. After connecting the antenna to my TV I fine-tuned the direction it was pointing using the signal strength meter in the menu options of my Vizio flat screen TV (the Tivo also has this capability with its built-in tuner).

The used Tivo was also easy to set up. I took the time to navigate through the menus to do a factory reset of the device to make sure it had no recorded content or oddball settings from the prior owner. It came with a wireless network adapter but I plugged it directly into my router instead. The Tivo is a few years old and the adapter wasn't able to take advantage of the 802.11n network in my house, so using a direct connection made sense for me. I activated the Tivo on their website and signed up for the $12.95 monthly service. I figure this is a small price to pay for the great guide and recording capabilities offered by the Tivo.

The Roku was equally easy to set up. It has fast WiFi built it and it quickly connected to my home wireless network. In minutes I was streaming high-def movies and TV shows from Netflix and browsing through my station collection in Pandora.

Putting together a plan in advance really helped, and I did quite a bit of online research before settling on the Tivo HD and the Roku. There are other DVR products out there like the Moxi and the ChannelMaster, and although neither requires a subscription they are very expensive up front. I also considered building a home theater PC to handle the recording of TV shows off the antenna, but the cost and the amount of work involved were prohibitive. The Tivo is dead simple to operate so for my needs it made the most sense. There are also a lot of antenna options. Radio Shack has a good selection but there are a lot of other stores specializing in this stuff.

Overall this process went very smoothly. Analyzing our TV watching habits made us realize how little we really watched the 200+ channels we were paying for and the transition to our new setup has been mostly painless. I figure I can always switch back to cable pretty easily if things don't work out and can even use the Tivo with a cable card if needed. But in the mean time I'm going to enjoy some money savings and hopefully spend less time parked on the couch flipping through an endless list of channels.