Back in September we finally did it...we called Cox and cancelled our $130 per month service. I thought I’d take some time to detail and describe how we’re doing without cable and it’s endless supply of programming...  

I’ve been flirting with the cord-cutting concept since December of 2011, when we bought our Roku 2 XS box for $100.  At first, it was enough to rent movies via Amazon Video On Demand.  At this time also, we began cataloging what shows we watch(ed) on the various cable networks, so we could begin to find alternate ways to watch those shows.  Some TV networks are more available than others, so it’s important to think this through in advance and see what is available outside of the cable bundle.

Caveat: I’m not that much of a TV viewer.  I have a few shows I follow, but by and large my wife is the Alpha consumer in our house.  As a student of pop culture, we’ve often joked that this degree program offered at Syracuse University is tailor made for her.  She remains the toughest critic of this experiment.

So I bought an RCA ANT751R HD antenna for the top of the house, and routed it’s signal to a splitter to feed all our household coax outlets.  This cost $24.98 via Amazon.com at the time, although I would shop around...the price appears to have doubled.  We are 17 miles from our transmitter cluster -- thanks to my iPhone compass, I pointed this antenna at 119 degrees SE, and got almost every Over The Air channel that’s available in our area.

Knowing our schedules with dinner and getting our 7-year-old ready for bed, we agreed a DVR would be essential after I turned in our old one back to Cox.  So I bought a refurbished Tivo Premiere for $68 -- this model accepts over the air TV signals.  Coupled with the $14.99 per month Tivo service, it does a pretty good job for us, and I remotely schedule programs from work via the web, or from the iPhone app around the house.  Plus, the Tivo DVR interface is hands-down better than the offerings that Cox offers.

NOTE: this particular Tivo unit does have a variety of on-demand services built-in (Amazon Video on Demand, Netflix, Hulu Plus, YouTube, etc.), but the responsiveness of the remote to the unit is painfully slow.  We regularly swap over to the Roku on Video 2 instead.

Setup costs (one time)

Tivo Premiere             $68.00

RCA HD Antenna        $24.98

Roku 2 XS                $100.00

                               $192.98

Ongoing monthly costs

Tivo service               $14.99

Netflix                         $7.99

Hulu Plus                     $7.99

PlayOn                       $4.99

                                $35.96

So with the DVR basics handled, next we began to see what was where in the Land of Streaming.  Some shows we watch are on Netflix, and some are on Hulu Plus.  I was surprised how many of our regular things (John Stewart, the Colbert Report) are on Hulu Plus, delayed by a day.  Not a big deal to me, but for some in the house, who access multiple screens to talk about shows in real-time, a problem...

Playon.tv is an interesting add-on we’re playing with.  It’s a software package that runs on a Windows PC somewhere on your home network and acts as a conduit between plugins for various networks.  It’s just different enough from Roku’s lineup to warrant the monthly cost -- it gives us selected shows from HGTV, Lifetime, History Channel, Food Network, to name a few.

In addition to the ongoing monthly costs, we round out our viewing with a healthy dose of shows and movies purchased via Amazon Video on Demand.  Things like “Walking Dead,” “American Horror Story,” “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”  Don’t judge.  These go for $1.99 per episode (non HD), which brings our average monthly television viewing cost up to around $70.  Still cheaper than our Cox Cable bundle, and we don’t feel we suffer....much.

The one casualty?  Random channel surfing, and mindlessly landing on “Sixteen Candles” whenever it happens to be on.  We have to be more deliberate about seeking out our entertainment.  Tivo tries to help by suggesting and recording things, but our Over The Air options are pretty limited in scope.  In our market, it appears that half the OTA channels are Spanish or Religious programming (sometimes both!).  The odds of “Sixteen Candles” showing up there are pretty slim.

I secretly wondered if, with more speed bumps on our easy access to things we’d either seen before or didn’t need to waste our time with, I’d return to reading more.  Or learn to play the Ukulele.  But the big box against the wall is a jealous mistress.  With all the furniture in the “TV room” oriented towards that smooth glass shrine, it’s hard to look away even for a minute.