a reply to:
ugmold
Had my own personal independence day weekend and made the call to cut the cord today. Well, my lovely wife did actually. I did all the geeky sweaty
work over the last few days so she could make the call.
Why? Our bill was approaching $200/month for TV (3 rooms) with HD, regional sports and a movie channel. Along with 75/75 internet and phone. Add in
Netflix and Amazon Prime on top, and now we're at stupid money for something we weren't using effectively. Plus our current 2 year contract pricing
expires next week. We'd already been notified of pending price increases. That was enough for me.
How? Well, here's what worked for us. Your mileage may vary. I'll also specifically state that I'm not endorsing any particular product that I
mention by name - they're just mentioned for technical clarity.
- We're homeowners, which made this a lot easier than if we were renters.
- We're focused sports nuts. Local US football team for Ms. Chewie37, local NHL team for me.
- Over the years we've collected a bunch of devices that are streaming capable.
- 3 of our 5 TV's are digital ready. Meaning they can receive local Over The Air (OTA) with an antenna.
- All of the local TV station towers are 30-50 miles South/Southeast of us.
- Instead of getting one of those indoor antenna's for each TV, I put an 8' multi-dipole HD antenna in the attic.
- Put a powered pre-amp/4 way splitter in the attic as well. Dropped a non-powered splitter off of one output to get to the 5 I needed.
- Since the original builder/cable company had done all the hard work of running coax to every room, all I had to do was pop the runs off of their
splitter and move them over to mine.
Hook the coax in each room up to a TV. All the 'big 4' come in crystal clear. Done. Well, almost.
- For the living room big screen, found a converter box that inputs OTA from the antenna and outputs to either RCA or HDMI. In our case HDMI to the
stereo receiver, which then goes out DVI to the ancient dinosaur TV.
- For the bedroom, finally knuckled under and just bought a new TV.
- Got an ATA telephony adapter for the phone, connected it to Google Voice. Got a new phone number to go with, but that's cool - we only get spam
calls on the land line these days anyway.
- Also found a 911 service - very important if you make the switch to VOIP!
- Signed up for Sony's Playstation Vue product because they offer most of the channels we tended to watch outside of local broadcast. But biggest
win for me, the hockey nut - regional sports networks. Including the one that carries our local NHL team. Yay!
End result?
- About a $300 outlay to get everything going - $150 for the new bedroom TV, $30 for the digital converter for the living room TV, $100 for the
antenna, some coax and cable ends.
- New price for just 50/50 internet service is $54.99; streaming service is $34.99. Even with taxes & service fees that gets us uner $100 month.
- Conveniently Ignore the ongoing MRC for NetFlix and Prime, and we'll see an ROI on the outlay in just over 3 months.