The Essentials: Cutting the Cord, One Year Later

The Essentials is a reoccurring column where I talk about what I use to write, work and honestly, survive the week.
It was almost exactly to the day that we 'cut the cord' in our house and decided to go all in on streaming services. During that time, we have learned quite a bit and there are some hurdles to overcome but at the end of the day, I think we made the right decision.

My cable provider, Cincinnati Bell, provides TV+Internet over a fiber line into my house. At the time when we did have cable, our monthly bill was approximately $75 for cable, $28 for DVR/Set top boxes and $50 for Internet (50 down, 20 up). Before we decided to dump cable, we took about a month or so and documented how much TV we were watching to see if we could get that content somewhere else.

For me, it came down to two things, golf and football; both of which I could watch over-the-air for free using an antenna my locally broadcasted games. For my wife, she wanted to watch Pretty Little Liars which we learned you can buy on iTunes for about $30 for the seasons she wanted to watch. After we compiled what we would be spending after dropping cable to what we were paying at the time, the choice was easy.

One thing to calculate when you are thinking about dropping cable is how many other services you will need to subscribe to as you will still likely want some form of entertainment available. For us, we went with Netflix ($10), Hulu ($13, limited commercial option) and Amzon (since I am a Prime member) along with a one time purchase of two HD antennas for about $25 each.

For our 'set-top' boxes, we are using Apple TVs that we had previously purchased but make sure to do your homework here as looking back, I'd likely prefer to use a Roku instead since Apple is taking its time releasing a 4k version of the device. Not to mention, I'm stuck using Apple TVs as that's where we purchased all of our content (movies, TV shows, etc). If you have a bunch of Google devices in your house, Chromecast is another solid option as well and an Xbox One can work too but are more expensive if you don't already own a console.

I had cable TV for about 25+ years, so going back to using an antenna was a bit of an experience. I figured that the new devices would simply just work but when watching CBS, we typically have to move the antenna around to get a good reception. I should run the antenna up into my attic and see if that gets us better coverage but have yet to do so even though it is inconvenient to move the antenna around but not so much that I'm willing to crawl around in insulation.

Also, I'm waiting for a new product to come out called the MoHu Airwave that allows you place the antenna anywhere which then streams the OTA content to any device using an app. What this should allow me to do is to watch broadcast television using an app for the Apple TV and hopefully remove the issue of a weak connection since I will have more flexibility with the new antenna.

One th...

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