After talking with a family member about moving out this past week it reminded me of what it was like when I first moved out. SAVE EVERY PENNY. A big place to save monthly reoccurring costs is by not having cable TV. I’ve gone through this in the past when I was single and ditching cable was an easy decision for me. After my fiance moved in that changed. Real Housewives and Vanderpump Rules became necessities. Fast forward to this morning and I decided to look back at going to a streaming only household and cut out cable completely.
As I always do, I started at the top and broke down the entire scenario (a spreadsheet was used) and determined my main focus points. Start-up costs, available content, what providers, and monthly cost. Below is my approach and why I determined that canceling TV and streaming monthly will work – FOR US. She definitely watches TV a lot more than I do so I did this simply to save money and make a smarter decision. We don’t have kids yet. This made the stream only approach an easier decision due not needing to consider the ease of use concerns with keeping the kids happy.
Start-up: This is minimal for us. We already have AppleTV, game systems, and blu-ray players that can stream content so we are set here. At most you are looking at a small device fee. I won’t go into details here on devices because I’m saving that for another blog entry. Just note that if you don’t have streaming devices this should be considered, besides, we are talking about saving money and not spending it.
Content: Since I still had AT&T U-Verse at the time of making this decision I turned the TV on and wrote down every network that we normally watch shows on. I was concerned that some of her reality TV shows were going to be difficult to accommodate for. I soon found out that the opposite is true. You really can stream anything you want except live sports. Sports is the most watched content on TV and is the most difficult content to stream. I’m not a huge sports guy, so I will except this loss. I still have friends and bars to go to if I want to catch a game. Again, realize I’m doing this to save money. I won’t be going to a bar every Sunday and spending $30 for food and drink to catch games. It’s not feasible and just ordering a water isn’t going to happen. There are options such as JustinTV or Ustream were people setup a broadcast and simply put their camera facing the tv with the game on. I don’t consider this direct content and guaranteed. So I will not list this as an option to rely on here. I say this because there are ways to make sports work, sort of. Present day, this is a big downside.
Providers: You have your major players – Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. These sites are used specifically for the purpose of streaming. You can go direct to ABC, HBO, or TV Networks, etc to get some free episodes, but to me that defeats the ease of use. I’d like to have consistent go-to’s. Not all shows are covered by the main three players. This is where we are going to rely on iTunes and Amazon Prime for purchasing season passes for shows. I will discuss this below.
Costs (Monthly):
Netflix – $8
Hulu – $8
Amazon Prime – $79 yearly so $7 monthly
ISP’s charge (Internet Service Provider). I’m a U-Verse customer and went with their highest tiered internet (24mbps down at a charge of $69 + taxes (roughly $82)).
Total monthly costs here is $105. I expect my ISP charge to be cheaper but I always use the extreme when I’m not certain. I will update when I know the exact cost. My U-Verse TV was already the lowest possible tier (U100). I believe most people would save more money than me because most people have a higher tiered package. To justify the savings I’m going to look at yearly values as well. With cable TV yearly I’m at $1,764. With streaming only I will be at $1,260. This is the base only cost. Remember not all shows are free. Since iTunes will be our main goto I looked at the season passes for shows that iTunes charges. They range between $15-$25 for a season depending on popularity. This means to break even I can only put $504 towards purchasing season passes for shows. Taking the high figure at $25 this allows us to purchase about 20 shows. When I compared the shows we want to watch that are not freely available it was only around four shows we will need to purchase. Thus we are saving $400 dollars initially.
I took into account all of the above and looked at it with the idea in mind “is this a smart and without sacrifice” approach for not just me, but my family. Here is my closing and true feelings. In the end we will probably save a little bit of money, but it is nothing to call home about. Sports is a major sacrifice. I will have to plan catching my favorite teams at family members homes or local bars. Sports is easily the biggest downside. There are bigger gains though because we now have instant access to any TV series and episode at any time we want at home or on the go. Not to mention movies are included from all of the providers. Movies are hit and miss because the new ones are slow to start streaming. We will continue red boxing and renting from Amazon or iTunes for movies. Not really a change there. With shows that we have to purchase season passes for the content becomes ours. We can watch those whenever, where ever, and the digital content we now own. Meaning they will never be remove from streaming because we own them.
We both decided we will try this method for a month or two. I will update this post as time goes by to really give my best opinion on this topic. I believe streaming is something that is great if you really want it to be. Unfortunately streaming is still not ready for mainstream, but is causing providers to re-think how they deliver content to homes. I do see this becoming the future route, but it’s not a present day decision unless you force it to be.
–Austin
Common Mans Home Theater 