Reducing The Cable Bill Part I: HDTV
The following is a reprint of a post that I made from my old blog Getting Out Of The Poorhouse: To find out why, see here.
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I love TV, I love the internet. I love HDTV, I love broadband. I love them so much I throw a ridiculous sum at them every month, $140.65 to be exact. That’s $1687.8 a year! But do I really need it? No. Since knowing is half the battle, here is what I did with the other half:
Part I: HDTV
Since I’ve turned over a new leaf and decided that brash consumerism (and the negative effect on your bottom line) was not for me, it became alarmingly apparent that $97.7 a month to watch TV is just not conducive to saving. Especially if out of the 500 or so channels that I receive, only 20 are actually in HD and 6 of those are the only ones I watch (which happened to be the local channels - ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, The CW, and PBS).
So why did I pay for it in the first place? It was an amalgamation of creative advertising (being lied to), freebies, and me being an idiot 
When I first got my HDTV I was told that the only way to get HD programming was to pay for it (i.e. cable and/or satellite). Second they threw in a ‘free’ ($5.99/month) DVR(Digital VIdeo Recorder) to record my shows. And third you can only get those HD channels by signing up for their upper tier packages - i.e. pay for 500 channels to watch the handful that you want (You got to love the cable TV business model though:) But since I’m now an advocate of frugality and saving - here are some of the happy discoveries that I’ve made:
1. You can get HDTV for free: All you need is a pair of rabbit ears, turns out my HDTV has an OTA (over the air digital tuner) HD tuner (biggest difference between an HDTV and an HD ready monitor). All I had to do was connect the antenna, do a channel scan and boom! 23 crystal clear digital stations found - including the local channels in HD. Yay!
2. Miss a show and don’t have a DVR? No problem: One of the bigger selling points for having an HD cable subscription was having a DVR to schedule and record shows when I’m not around the house to watch them live (time shifting). However local networks have since started streaming their shows on their websites a day after they originally air. The majority are in HD quality too (Lost at abc.com for example).
3. How about movies in HD? Try Netflix: I’ve been a Netflix user for about 6 months now and it’s great. They have a huge selection of high-def movies in Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD when they still offered it 
This deserves it’s own post). I signed up for the 3 at a time plan for $18.95. You make up a queue of movies and TV shows you want to watch and they send you the ones on the top of the list. It’s convenient and the turnaround time is decent. But the biggest advantage is their “Watch Now” feature. Like the TV streaming from the network stations, Netflix also does this, with a pretty impressive catalog to boot. New movies and shows are added every day with DVD (if not better) quality.
Armed with this knowledge, I’ve packed up my cable DVR and drove up to the local cable branch to return it and cancel my HD cable package. Opting to downgrade to the most basic package of $15 for local (Non-HD) access to retain my broadband internet discount.
What I use to pay for TV: $97.7
Now: $15 for basic cable + 18.95 Netflix = $33.95
Savings: $63.75 a month or $765 a year. All of which I plan to pay down my debt with
Tomorrow, Part II - Broadband Internet.
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