Getting Started

Recently I decided to trim back on some of my spending. An expense that I have been interested in reducing for some time is my cable bill. The problem is that my fiancé and I watch about 2-3 hours of TV per day, so I will need something to replace it. There are many different ways to deliver content to your home but none are as convenient as simply switching on the TV and it just being there.

While I am willing to do a little upfront work to replace cable the final solution has to be pretty simple for the family. So what I am thinking is getting content from three different places; over air (broadcast), internet TV, and Netflix.

• Broadcast – This will involve me building and installing a large HD antenna in my attic. I will then plug that into my existing coax cable runs to deliver the signal to all my existing TV’s. I will also set up Windows Media Center to act as a DVR.
• Internet TV – There are several different providers of internet TV including the WEB, Media Center, BOXEE, etc. Since I will be using Media Center as my DVR, it would be preferable to using is to get internet TV, however, I don’t think they are there yet. The best thing I have come across for this is BOXEE, and with their new release on January 7th I think it will only get better. We’ll see.
• Netflix – This will provide on-demand movies. While this option has a cost associated with it, it is still substantially less than cable and is better than a premium channel (HBO, etc.) in many ways.

I plan to incrementally build up this alternative and slowly (over a couple of months) wean off of cable. Once we have not needed to switch over to cable for 21 straight days I will cancel it.

My desire is to keep the costs of this project to under $700 (approx. 1 year of cable).

Advertisement