Save money, ditch cable, watch TV and movies online
Published: 1/9/2013 12:58 PM
Last Modified: 1/9/2013 12:59 PM
Smart TVs make it simple to stream online videos to your television. Brian Ach/AP Images for LG Home Electronics
My parents have satellite TV—a system I got them hooked on back when I lived at home. But like many others, they now question the $150-a-month price tag when there are bills to be paid and everyone basically gets a 2 percent pay cut as a souvenir from America's trip to the fiscal cliff.
Cable can be a hard expense to justify unless you're a high-volume consumer — say, a five-person household filling up the DVR with two to four hours a day of programming. That's a cable or satellite customer getting their money's worth. But my parents, who watch less than two hours of TV a day, could be quite happy with the kind of content available on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Instant Video. With an Internet connection and some hardware, we could halve their entertainment budget.
For now, I think my mom is too addicted to being able to remote-fast-forward through “So You Think You Can Dance” to actually give up satellite and DVR, but for those who do want to cut their budgets, I'll give you the same tips I've given my folks.
First is your Internet connection. These can vary greatly by type and cost, but you could pay as little as $20-25 or as much as $60-80 (if you live in a rural area). DSL or cable modem-based connections are a personal preference thing, but that can be a cost variable, as well.
Next, sign up for free trials of Netflix, Hulu Plus (the service that'll let you watch network and some cable shows the day after they air) and Amazon Instant Video. Through these basic services, users can access more than half a million videos — new and classic TV, movies and more. The monthly cost of each is about $8, but the free trials let you spend time browsing the services so you can decide which, if any, you want to live without.
But let's say you go all in and spend about $25 a month. With what I'll call an average Internet bill, $45, that could still be a great improvement for many people over their cable TV or satellite bill. But there can be an additional hardware expense, depending on whether you already have a laptop, gaming console, smart TV, Roku, or newer-generation iPhone or iPad.
Which of these devices you'll use to escape your cable-tethered lifestyle will also determine the level of patience you may need to employ in making it work anywhere near as seamlessly as cable. By way of an example, think of those seminars where the speaker can never get the AV stuff to work right away. That is likely to happen to you, but a little practice will work out the kinks.
A smart TV is the easiest way to take advantage of going streaming-only for your living room entertainment. The set itself will have apps you can flip to on the main remote, and it's not hard to search and change videos in an instant. If you connect a game console to your TV, the newer systems typically offer users the ability to download video-streaming apps. Roku is a small device dedicated to video streaming and is another easy way to get your entertainment from the Internet.
If you have to connect another device to your TV, that's where the most patience needs to be employed. A laptop can be the trickiest, but it also has the biggest payoff in that you can view anything your computer is playing, for example a Flash-powered video (the bane of mobile web streaming) such as Hulu's free service. For this, you'll need a couple cables. One will use the laptop's video-out port to connect to the yellow composite TV input, and the other will connect the microphone jack to the white and red inputs. The audio cable should be cheap at a place like Radio Shack, but the video-out cable can be more difficult. It could cost $5 to $25, for various PC and Mac notebooks. Google your specific model to get help on choosing which cable (e.g. S-video, 15-pin, mini-DV, HDMI) is right for your laptop. The trickiest part, as those seminar speakers taught us, is ensuring the laptop will mirror the display on your TV. If you're not familiar with your notebook's display settings, you might want to explore this before ditching cable.
An easier solution: If you own a newer iPhone and or iPad, Apple makes a dependable video/audio-out cable that uses the power port on the device and connects to the TV's composite inputs. On a few apps that support video out (Netflix, YouTube, etc.), once you connect the device to the TV, the display automatically shifts to the TV. No fuss, no muss. This comes in handy only if you have a Wi-Fi connection set up at your house, because Netflix videos' quality suffers on 4G, and Amazon Instant Video won't even load unless the device is on Wi-Fi. But in high-resolution phones and tablets, the translation to even a larger TV is decent quality video, and I've found Netflix to be less buggy this way than when I try to use my laptop.
So there you have it. If you're comfortable with AV cables, able to toggle the auxiliary inputs on your TV and can depend on a decent Internet connection, you should be able to ditch cable and watch TV and movies online.
Written by
Anna Codutti
Scene Writer
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