Cable and satellite delivery of television content is king in the United States And Canada. In its latest Cross-Platform Report, Nielsen found 81.8 percent of Americans have either cable or satellite television in their homes. But while cable and satellite are the most prevalent ways of watching TV, they’re also in a slight decline. In 2011, 83.2 percent subscribed to these services.
Some of the drop can be attributed to so-called cord-cutters – people who’ve given their cable boxes and the big bills that accompany them the old heave-ho. They make up a very small percentage of the TV audience, but they’re growing in numbers. Nielsen says there are now 5 million “zero TV” households in the U.S., up from over 2 million in 2007. These folks may still watch television content, but they’re doing it on other devices, or streaming via the Net to their television sets.
One of the reasons they can do this is that there are now many other ways to legally watch popular TV shows. The cable TV industry refuses to offer channels a la carte, charging its customers big bucks for hundreds of channels they never watch. Now, most of the very popular TV series can be watched online, with users paying by the show or by the season.
I paid my first cable TV bill around 1980, and I’ve fed the beast ever since. While I’m not a voracious TV watcher – our household probably has 5-10 shows we follow closely – I feel like I’ve gotten good value out of cable. Cord-cutting has intrigued me, but I’ve felt the convenience of cable, particularly when combined with a DVR, has been worth the cost.
But last month, something made me rethink that value. And now, I’m on the verge of cutting the cord, dropping my cable service and relying solely on the Internet for my television needs.
Ironically, it was the action of a cable company that made me rethink things. When Comcast doubled the connection speed for most of its Houston customers without increasing prices, I noticed the quality of video I was seeing from Netflix and other streaming services was noticeably better. That, in turn, made me do something I hadn’t done in a while: Look at how much cable service costs me. It was a number that was much higher than I realized.
We subscribe to AT&T’s U-verse for TV, and we pay between $130-$140 a month. One of the reasons it’s relatively high is that we’re not bundling it with any other service. We have Comcast Internet and a traditional AT&T landline (which we may also drop).
The costs of U-verse break down like this, using March as an example:
U-verse’s U200 plan, its second-least-expensive tier: $74 a month.
HD content fee: $10 a month.
Showtime: $14 a month
Additional fees and taxes: $20.74 in March (varies).
On-demand movies watched: $18 in March (varies).
That makes a total $136.74 we paid last month. If we pay an average $135 a month, that totals out to $1,620 we cough up each year to watch television.
We already do some video streaming. We pay $8 a month (plus tax) for Netflix’s streaming service. We spent $19.42 in March for movies we watch via Amazon Instant Video, which is about average.
If we give up cable TV, we’ll still watch television, we’ll have to get it elsewhere. And we can do most of it without buying new hardware. Here’s how that might work:
Plenty of traditional broadcast and some cable TV can be covered by paying $8 a month for Hulu Plus, a streaming service jointly operated by News Corp., ABC and NBC/Comcast. Series we enjoy such as ABC’s “Gray’s Anatomy” (don’t judge!) and FX’s “The Americans” are covered by this. Our Samsung HDTV has a Hulu Plus app, so we’re covered there.
Some shows we’re prepared to pay for via Amazon Instant Video, buying season passes for series such as “Breaking Bad” ($22), “Mad Men” ($30), “Hell On Wheels” ($26), “The Walking Dead” ($34) or “Sons of Anarchy” ($32). Generally, these seasons air once a year, making each one an annual cost. We’ve got an Amazon.com app in our TV, so this would require no new hardware.
There are other, lower-cost ways to see some shows. CBS, for example, streams episodes from its CBS.com website the day after they’ve been broadcast for free. CBS also has an iPad app and it might be possible to show, say, “CSI” via an HDMI adapter to my iPad. I’ve got the adapter and cable.
So let’s say there are seven shows we’d want to pay for each year, at an average of $30 per season. That’s $210 a year. Add the $16 per month cost for Netflix and Hulu Plus, and clearly that $226 $402 annually is a lot less than $1,620.
Still, there’s a significant hassle factor here. We’d have to juggle which shows come from which sources. If we opt for watching shows via the iPad-to-HDMI method, that involves finding the iPad, digging out the cable and setting everything up. My wife, who has little patience for working through technical kludges, says she’s willing to put up with it given the amount of money we’d save. We’ll see.
While I’m hesitant to buy more hardware, an AppleTV could be an option. We could use its AirPlay feature to stream video and Web content to the TV from the iPad or our Macs, but that would be a $99 expenditure. It would also give us the option of using the iTunes Store to watch content that might not be available through Amazon.
We don’t watch a lot of sports in our house, so we wouldn’t miss channels such as ESPN. We’ve got an external antenna so we can watch over-the-air HDTV, but we wouldn’t have a DVR to record live TV. We could buy a third-party DVR, such as a TiVo, but that saddles us with another monthly TV bill, along with the cost of the hardware.
We could connect a PC or a Mac to our HDTV and use Windows Media Center or Elgato’s EyeTV for OS X, but again, that involves hardware purchases.
So, we’re going to start with an experiment. Hulu Plus offers a free week trial, and we’ll subscribe to that and use it instead of our DVR for the week. If all goes well, I’ll give U-verse a call next week and tell them we’re terminating service.
Our adventures in cord-cutting will evolve over time. I’ll keep you updated along the way.
And if you’ve successfully cut the cord, let us know about it. Offer your suggestions and strategies in the comments.
Related: Earlier this year, I wrote about Aereo, a service that lets you stream live, broadcast TV over the Internet. Supposedly, Aereo is coming to Houston soon, but only if it survives legal challenges.
Well, today there’s good news: A federal appeals court ruled that Aereo doesn’t violate copyright law.
From the Associated Press:
The 2-to-1 ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cleared the way for Aereo Inc.’s expansion of its $8-a-month service, which had been limited to New York City until this year. Several weeks ago, the company expanded to New York City suburbs, including New Jersey and parts of Connecticut, and it has announced plans to expand to Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington and 18 other U.S. markets later this year.
Aereo isn’t out of the woods yet. But the ruling is promising.
Dwight Silverman
No comments:
Post a Comment