Are You Thinking About Cutting the Cable TV Cord?

I don't know about your cable service, but I'm paying way too much for a lot of channels I'll never watch. The problem is that the ones we really like are not available online. We also live far from over-the-air HD TV, so we're not ready to cut cable TV yet, but we're thinking about it. 

NewTeeVee cites a Parks Associates study that 8% of US households are considering dropping cable TV for online and DVD rental services.

And households considering cutting the cord watch 10 hours of online video per week, which Parks calls “much higher than typical video consumers.” Potential cord-cutters also rented a median of 18 DVDs during the last six months, compared to two DVDs for customers willing to stick with cable.

What explains the discrepancy? Netflix, of course, a service with its high turnover rate for rentals, and possibly Redbox with its ultra-low rental prices, according to Parks Associates research director John Barrett. “Nobody is going to rely on online video alone — households likely to cancel their TV services are going to use a mixture of online video, free-to-air broadcasts, and DVDs,” he said, adding that the threat of cord-cutting was “real but misunderstood” because people tend to focus on online video alone and ignore DVD rentals.

Have you cut the cord, or are you seriously considering it?

Comments

[Jeremiah]

We use Netflix watch instantly on a Roku exclusively. We don't even have a digital converter for our old tvs. So its, news from the web and the growing number of tv shows available on Netflix. Keep up the good work!

[Terry]

I was paying about $121 for cable and internet from Comcast (HD and DVR included). Living by myself and with Netflix, Hulu, etc that I could now run through my TV, keeping my cable box seemed not all that worth it. However, I made a quick call to them asking about downgrading or cutting my cable altogether, and not a minute later, they were offering me the same service plus additional channels for $70 a month. If you think your cable is too much and you'd hate to part with it, make a call threatening to cut it, and I can bet you'll get a better deal.

[Mark]

Those with young kids and those who are avid sports fans are pretty much forced to keep cable, there is no good online replacement for Disney/Nick/ESPN etc.

This is why the cable industry has fought "a la carte" pricing, if I could save serious money I'd drop all but about a dozen cable channels. But the cable companies know that and know it would hurt them severely.

[Biff]

We cut the cable cable about a year ago. Don't miss it. We cut because of the spiraling cost and the commercials, especially during sporting events (I don't want to know anymore about ED treatments. Enough!). We have little kids and it was becoming apparent to us that the dwindling/dispersed audience was causing all networks to take any advertiser with hard cash. They will show any ad at any time as long as the check clears. More power to them but that is not for us.

Now we rely on Netflix, Netflix streaming, Hulu and MLB.tv. We will get a streaming set top box once the studios figures out how they are going to handle their back catalogs.

Love the site.

[Tom Miller]

We cut the cord over 2 years ago now, and my wife and I don't miss it. We have great over the air reception with plenty of channels, and we have Windows Media Center to watch Internet TV and Netflix. I also have a Roku box for additional content. We have more TV than we have time to watch. We only watched a few channels on a regular basis anyway, and it was not worth paying $50+ for those few channels.

[Stephan]

We cut cable. My digital antenna gets me the broadcast networks, and Hulu and Netflix get me everything else I want. My DSM-520 has PlayOn Live on it, which plays both on my tv as well.

I can understand how hard it is to drop if you children are used to it. If you don't have it from the beginning though, its not a problem. PBS is a great alternative in the morning, and after school, I don't know, play a game with them?

[bill]

Live sports is about all that keeps me from cancelling cable.

[Nat Mishkin]

Since most of my TV watching was already through Netflix, about 5 or more years ago, I cut my (Comcast) cable TV service back to the under-promoted "just the local broadcast channel" tier (roughly $13/month) when another price hike was coming through and making me want to gag. Last summer, when I moved to a new house that's closer to the broadcast towers, I dispensed with cable TV altogether.

That said I'm now only 8 miles from the transmitter and get less than ideal reception. Yes, it's just a rabbit ears in my attic (although I do have a decent RF amp on it and an unobstructed path), but geesh, I'd think that'd work more reliably than it does. Most of the channels are OK most of the time, but some of them regularly suck. I guess so many people get them over cable these days that no one really notices that OTA digital ain't so great?

[CMHDave]

We cut the cable cord 5 or 6 years ago. Every football season I toy with the idea of subscribing to cable for the games but end up not doing it. As long as my NFL team stays on CBS I don't think I'll ever get cable again. Roku is on almost exclusively at our house. No commercials for something you already pay for, what a novel idea.

[Chuck]

We cut the cord on 1/20/2009. I watched the entire season of my college team on ESPN 360 with no problems (not as good of quality, but...).

Most of our entertainment comes either OTA (very little), Hulu (alot) and Netflix (Roku and Xbox360...really, really alot).

I've heard that Hulu may become a paid service, and I will re-evaluate that option when it happens.

C

[Dennis]

A friend of mine planned to replace cable with OTA plus Boxee or similar and DVR software. He cut the cable before he had anything other than OTA to replace it, which didn't go over very well with his wife and teen/tween kids. But after a week or two, they had found other things to fill their time (and other things to watch), so he's not even sure the other stuff is necessary.

@Nat Mishkin: "OTA digital ain't so great?" On the contrary, OTA digital should look as good or better than cable. Have you looked at antennaweb.org or tvfool.com to see what kind of antenna you should have? Cutting that last $13/month for basic cable would pay for a better antenna in a few months.

[lynn]

i have the most basic service for $16 a month. i have tried cutting it all together and missed it. i actually enjoy cable more when i eliminated the surfing thru 200 stations and never watching a whole program.

[John Dover]

A decade ago I went to basic basic cable (the ~13 channel variety) After getting Netflix, we then dropped that. There was a lot less TV watching in our life! It was a good thing. Then videos started showing up online until things are the way they are now. Now my wife watches even more reality TV crap then she did when it was on cable. We live in a valley, so zero OTA unless we put up a mast 8-10 feet above our roof line. The hardest part at first was losing the daily show and foodtv. I got over food network (their programming has gotten worse) and TDS showed up online a couple a years ago.

[Susan]

Cut the cord 2 years ago. I do have small kids but between OTA PBS for the 4 year old and disney channels offerings on Netflix they don't care. We have a mac mini hooked up o our TV with a EYETV and our TV is netflix connected as well. If we could only have ESPN we'd be happy. Don't know how above poster got ESPN360. Thought you had to have a cable account login to get that.

[Tino]

I would love to cancel cable and subscribe to online sports channels (NHL GameCenter, etc) but with the ridiculous blackout rules, I still can't watch my local teams.

[kb01]

We cut the cord on cable last year and now rely on our Roku and 5 at a time DVD rental w/Netflix. We have a digital converter box but never use it outside of an occasional football game.

I really don't miss cable at all and have discovered a lot of very good TV shows that I didn't even know existed. Plus, we're saving a bundle of money each month.

[Josh]

cut the cord and have not looked back over a year ago... might be getting close to 2...

parting with cable was such a non issue that I can't remember... Thanks Netflix!

[Nathan]

I was paying over $140 for Comcast cable and high speed internet. I got tired of paying it and called to cancel the cable (I watch most new stuff off of Hulu). Comcast gave a deal where I still get the high speed internet and basic cable (channels 1-99) for $42.95 a month for 12 months. We will see what happens this summer when it is up.

However, I have heard that cable companies can't turn off the basic cable when you have high speed internet, since there is no box to block the channels. Has anyone else experienced this?

[Win]

We cut the cable a couple of months ago. Been using Netflix and Hulu with good results. I was hoping Boxee would be a good all-in-one solution, but haven't found it to be so far. We miss Discovery and a few other things, but not much.

[Jack]

Although we had a great deal on cable (we paid $18 a month for ten years for local access and were given basic cable), we canned it a few months ago. To be honest, the vast majority of cable tv is crap.

I hooked up an old antenna I salvaged from my uncle's old house, connected the coax line to it and get a pretty decent amount of local channels. PBS in Chicago has 3 channels alone and is really great for our kids.

We got the Roku about a month ago and everyone (especially my wife) loves it - the selection doesn't have a lot of the newest releases, but we've discovered a lot of little known movies we've really enjoyed.

If I really need to watch a TV show (Lost or Star Wars Clone Wars), I'll download a torrent and watch it through my USB port on my DVD player.

I just wish Comedy Central would create a channel on Roku so I could watch Stewart/Colbert.

[Mike]

w/ netflix, hulu, and digital HD over the air, i don't think i'll ever get cable

[RJ]

We cut our $85 Dish Network bill about 9 months ago. I thought it would be hard to not have live sports available but I find more sporting options online than I ever had with Dish . Granted it isn't HD but most of the time the quality is fine. We also have Netflix in which our girls get their cartoon fix.

[Wineinger]

Would love to cut the cable, so to speak. But there are about 6 hidef stations I cannot do without: CBS,NBC,ABC,ESPN,ESPN2,ESPNU, and NatGeo.

[N]

We cut our cable quite a while ago but still have cable internet. To answer the question "I have heard that cable companies can't turn off the basic cable when you have high speed internet, since there is no box to block the channels. Has anyone else experienced this?" This seems to be the case for us, and to be honest, it's one of the reasons we go with cable internet vs dsl. I think it's the same channels as their local package that they charge $16 a month for?

Every once and a while it's nice to be able to flip through channels and find something you're interested in but weren't thinking about (this happens maybe once a month). It's also a good reminder to me of why we cut it in the first place. Commercials, set start times, a bunch of junk I'm not interested in, etc.

Now I'm just waiting for the Boxee Box or PopBox to show up.

[jkdoug]

My wife and I cut the cable TV, just using the cable Internet to watch streaming Netflix now. Couldn't be happier!

True on-demand video - not the 1000+ crap options from Comcast like 3 minute low-def music videos from six years ago.

No commercials - why am I paying for cable and I still have to watch hundreds of advertisements?

I mean, there's a reason the Comcast offices have bullet-proof shields, am I right?

[sean]

Not considering cutting the cord. It's not even an option really. Never had cable to begin with...

[Nemo]

I "cut the cord" just over a year ago. At the time, we mostly liked to watch Discovery Channel, History, National Geographic, etc. In order to get NatGeo, I had to get one of Comcast's largest digital cable packages. This was horribly expensive.

We still can't get most of the NatGeo and Discovery stuff we liked to watch, but we just deal with it. We use the Roku box to watch most of the stuff we watch now (which in many cases is different stuff than we used to watch), and a custom-built HTPC to watch a few other things on Hulu.

It was hard to give up a lot of our favorite shows, but that's just something we had to deal with. Now I've saved well over a thousand dollars, and certainly don't regret it!

[ScottZ]

Interestingly, if nobody had cable/sat service, their would be better free broadcast options and content.

[George]

The only thing keeping us from doing it is the crap I would catch from my kids for removing Disney channel. I would pay Disney for a streaming, no-commercial Roku channel.

[Liz]

My husband watches way too much sports to ever get rid of cable completely. But we haven't had any premium channels in a couple of years.

[Freddy Paulino]

I cut cable a year ago because of the recession

and could't afford cable bills.I rely on

netflix and redbox anf over the air HD.

[kb01]

"However, I have heard that cable companies can't turn off the basic cable when you have high speed internet, since there is no box to block the channels. Has anyone else experienced this?"

That's now how it worked for us (we had Comcast). We kept cable internet and dropped TV entirely. Every channel is blocked and it's just snow.

However, they did raise the cost of cable internet by $10 because we no longer got a multiple service discount.

[BP]

I will never, ever pay a single cent to a cable company for as long as I live.

If the networks were smart they'd start selling a la carte services over the internet. I'd be more than happy to pay HBO, Showtime, Discovery, Cartoon Network, HDNet, Universal Movies, Fox Movies, etc. a few bucks each a month for their services.

Come on networks. Get a clue.

[Zach]

We dropped cable several years ago and never looked back. We get all our tv through Netflix or the internet.

No commercials, no reruns, no waiting, and we watch on our own schedule.

Zero regrets.

[Ryan]

I have the basic $34.99 per month DirecTV package (that will go up to $54 after one year which includes no HD.
That being said, I usually spend 90% of my time watching Netflix Instant Queue via my Xbox and catching up on my Tivo.
While I still need some sort of satellite/cable situation to record the tv shows on cable that I watch (Nip/Tuck, Psych, TNA) I could always just stop watching those shows live and wait for the DVDs or online viewing options.

[GeorgeO]

TivoHD + OTA + Netflix and you're DONE!

[String Theory]

We cut cable back in '04 and haven't regretted it. We were spending $135 per month for TV and internet back then (Time Warner Cable NYC) and finally came to our senses. Hulu and YouTube didn't exist then and Netflix didn't have streaming yet but we made do with a 4 out plan and a few P2P offerings. Now, there are so many good things to watch online it's crazy. We love it.

[corq]

Cut cable last April. I get good OTA Digital TV, Boxee on the linux HTPC and 2 Roku boxes. Back when cable was the place you watched with fewer commercials and good content, I didn't mind what I paid for. Prime sport events still show on boadcast stations.

[Bob Emmerich]

We haven't dropped cable yet - sports and kids shows as others have stated - but I'm glad the option is growing in popularity.

I did try 1 of those $30 digital receivers but got nothing. According to the website info that came with the antennae I'm about 33 miles from most antennas but the limit is 30. Who knew Long Island was the boonies?

I did drop my cable service to $15 basic from $55 Family, though it only nets me $20 due to lost bundle discounts.

I am tempted to try getting those basic channels for free with my phone and cable modem and saving another $35 ($15 for service, $7 for box, $12 for iO service for said box).

Which brings me to my last point - if cable companies do ever go a la carte, expect to pay mucho dinero for many cable boxes (1 for every tv), plus a "Service charge" for supplying service, plus I'ld say $5 per channel. So we'll all get a lot less channels but save very little money. Of course in this economy - which looks like it may be sticking around for awhile - every dollar helps.

[Dan]

I didn't cut the cable completely. I tried to get OTA digital but it didn't work out. What I found was that my cable company (Cablevision) offers a $15/month plan for the first 22 channels. I went with that and added a fourth disc onto my Netflix plan. I mainly watch Netflix, Hulu, and others online, but there's no good, reliable way to watch football online so I keep it. My son really likes PBS kids too.