It's been a year since we said our good byes to our local cable provider and decided to only watch TV using our Roku device. By going cable free for the past year, my family has gladly saved $480 bucks. There also was a short period of time we were both cable and Internet free (due to the fire, if your new to my blog we had a house fire and temporary living in an apartment while our home is being re-built). Now being cable free was the easy part, not being able to access the Internet HARD, like super HARD. Yeah we have smart phones, but I can only do so much online looking around on my phone before I get bored, more on that in a few. I was so excited about our decision to cut the cable cord and save money, I even blogged about it! Read my post for last year here. For some people it's a hard decision to give up cable altogether, what made it so easy for us besides the savings is still being able to enjoy watching all our favorite shows & movies on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon.com and sometimes Crackle.
So I thought I'd write a new blog post and share how our current setup is going and the tweaks we've made the past year to our setup. As said mentioned, we were Internet free for a several months and also TV free. Our old setup at our house we were able to get 20 channels for free, such a good thing, just by doing a scan on our TV and hooked our TV directly to the cable outlet. However we moved to our temporary apartment, it has Fiber Optics verses our house which has DSL meaning even though we'd do a scan looking for free channels none would appear the only option is paying for cable or Internet. We initially thought we'd be in a temporary place for a few months, so we held off on getting Internet and just made do. When reality set in, we decided to go with Comcast for Internet service while we live here than switch back to AT&T since Comcast is more cost effective at the apartment.
Current Set Up
We are paying $37 bucks a month for Comcast, the Fiber Optics is more per month than DSL, so that sucks, but its the best price we could find for Fiber Optics. Anyways we now have two Roku players and are very happy! In our living room we have a Roku 2 XS which is a second generation Roku, we love it. The new Roku player is tiny, and works so great we can also play Angry Birds on it, and trust me you haven't lived until you've played Angry Birds on a big TV, lol.
So I thought I'd write a new blog post and share how our current setup is going and the tweaks we've made the past year to our setup. As said mentioned, we were Internet free for a several months and also TV free. Our old setup at our house we were able to get 20 channels for free, such a good thing, just by doing a scan on our TV and hooked our TV directly to the cable outlet. However we moved to our temporary apartment, it has Fiber Optics verses our house which has DSL meaning even though we'd do a scan looking for free channels none would appear the only option is paying for cable or Internet. We initially thought we'd be in a temporary place for a few months, so we held off on getting Internet and just made do. When reality set in, we decided to go with Comcast for Internet service while we live here than switch back to AT&T since Comcast is more cost effective at the apartment.
Current Set Up
We are paying $37 bucks a month for Comcast, the Fiber Optics is more per month than DSL, so that sucks, but its the best price we could find for Fiber Optics. Anyways we now have two Roku players and are very happy! In our living room we have a Roku 2 XS which is a second generation Roku, we love it. The new Roku player is tiny, and works so great we can also play Angry Birds on it, and trust me you haven't lived until you've played Angry Birds on a big TV, lol.
A few months after buying our new Roku, we decided our family need another Roku player, for our bedroom we purchased the Roku HD. Our remote for the Roku HD is actually a little different than in the picture below, there's dedicated buttons for Netflix, Pandora and Crackle, which is so cool.
What We Pay For
We subscribe to six channels: Netflix, Amazon, Crackle, Hulu Plus, Pandora and Flixster but still only pay a small monthly fee for two channels. We pay for Netflix and Hulu Plus, which are both only $7.99 per month. We did a trial period with Amazon Prime, since I love shopping on Amazon we gave it a try. In my opinion there wasn't enough options for movies and TV shows, or maybe it was such hard to find programs I wanted to watch. That's one thing I like about Netflix, its very intuitive and recommends movies and TV shows based on recent watches. For instance Netflix, 'knows' I love period pieces and British TV shows, thanks to Netflix I have discovered so many amazing TV shows and movies. In the future, we might give Amazon another try, we still rent movies from them. If you follow me on Instagam, then you already know we had a Die Hard-a-thon over the weekend and rented those movies online via Amazon.
What TV Shows We Watch
As I said, we discovered so many great TV Shows thanks to Netflix & Hulu. Here are a few shows Hasani and I enjoy watching together: Breaking Bad, The Killing, The Walking Dead sadly all three of those shows are on AMC, and they don't release their shows to Netflix so were always a season or two behind what's happening, which is cool gives us time to do marathons something we love. We also love Shark Tank! Such a good show. Solo, I like to watch Downton Abbey so glad other people are discovering this amazing show! I watch Downton directly on the PBS website. I also enjoy watching Doc Martin (one of my favorite shows) George Gently, Revenge, and Scandal. Our tween is also able to watch his favorite TV shows, so he's also a happy camper. Can't forget the little guy, Avery is able 'watch' Sesame Street and Yo Gabba Gabba, his shows are on for background noise.
My Must See TV
Even though I'm very happy to be cable free, I do miss watching shows like Real Housewives of Beverly Hills / Atlanta and the crazy Jersey ladies. So I'm always happy when Hulu Plus shares a few episodes online. In addition to watching cable, I love listening to Pandora on the Roku player and creating my own channels, especially since MTV has played music sine the 90's
Now your turn how are you currently watching TV? Have you cut the cable cord and loving it? If so, how much did you save each year going without cable? Or could you never give up cable and why? Ever heard of a Roku player?
Last year, I asked everyone a bonus question. This years bonus Questions what TV show are you obsessed with and why should other people get hooked on it?
