I love TV. I think it should go without saying that it wasn’t my love of Broadway or film that drove me to wanting to be in this business. No. I wanted to be on TV. That was the dream. It’s always been the dream.
I love the boob tube.
A few months ago I did some number crunching and compared the amount of outlay to usage. What I first learned was that, just by dropping HBO and Showtime we could save $360 a year. But, would we miss all great quality programming? Yes. And No. Sure there are terrific things there for us to watch. Girls. Game of Thrones. Homeland. The Newsroom. True Blood. Nurse Jackie. But we weren’t watching much of the rest. Now. A season pass to all of those shows on iTunes or Amazon or Vudu would cost about $200. So, we would be saving $160 by just cutting those nets out.
But, what about the rest of cable?
Mad Men. American Horror Story. Walking Dead. There really aren’t that many other shows we can’t live without. And, truth be told. If we just want to wait a year, they are all available on Netflix. But, let’s say we want them now. To be current.
That’s about another $110 a year. Let’s just add another show and round up. So, by dropping HBO and Showtime, forgoing the shows we don’t watch and buying the ones we do, we can buy 10 shows and those premiums will just pay for that.
If we cut the cord and dump DirecTV in toto, that would be an additional $80+ a month.
Well, certainly we can’t just drop everything, right?
We subscribe to Amazon Prime already, $6.60 a month. $80 a year.
Netflix, despite the mediocre content, (although they get a lot of the shows we would be watching) is, what? $8 a month? $96 a year.
Hulu would give us the cache of a full Criterion Collection movie library, but, more importantly for me, NBC, ABC, FOX and Comedy Central. $8, $96.
But, damn that CBS. How can I get my Chuck Lorre comedy fix? Or A repetitive procedural? Or that Race which is Amazing???
More importantly, what about Football, Baseball, The Super Bowl, the Oscars, The Tonys, The Emmys, The Olympics?
Tivo Roamio + a $35 digital antenna. The Roamio basic can record over the air in high def for $13 a month. But, since we were lifetime subscribers with our last Tivo Box, we get a discount on the lifetime. $400. Over 5 years that comes to about $6.70 a month or $80 a year.
$30 a month or $350 a year. That’s a $970 annual savings on the basic plus premium package.
If the average cost of a subscription to those above shows is $37, that’s another 26 season passes on TOP of the ones I named above.
35 season passes. That’s just not gonna happen. Who has the time???
And the video quality is supposed to be better than the compression on satellite or cable.
Since I wasn’t sure we were going to even think about trying this, I never posted this even though this has been in the planning stages for about 4 months.
Phase 1 was consideration.
Phase 2 was early implementation without complete cutting.
I’ll let you know how that goes.
