Bye-bye television.
Well, more like, bye-bye Dish Network. Management and I sat down and talked about everything from the economy playing out like the Titantic to how much TV we actually watch and came to the conclusion that we are not getting $120 a month worth of anything from it. Our solution? We are ditching it. Completely. Moving on to cable? Nope.
Here’s our crazy idea. GreenCine for our main DVD rentals, Netflix account for streaming, and an Xbox 360 for watching the streams and playing games. All together it is a little less than $30 a month so we are looking at a net savings of $90 a month and if we cancel the gym and spa memberships we will be saving around $260 per month. Sure we have the up front cost of the Xbox but that really is only 20% of the annual cost of Dish.
We are thinking that the end of this month is when we’ll leap feet first into the “post television” era, just in time for the Holidays.
The thought is that we should be making cutbacks to our lifestyle before we are forced to and to truly make an effort to live as far below our means as we can. We have, over the past year, been consciously cutting back on dining out and delaying or not making purchases that aren’t of an immediate need. The hope is that we can put our lifestyle on a diet so that when lean times hit they won’t feel so lean.
If anything we’ll be saving some money and maybe have more time to read a book and who knows maybe it will all work out and television as a monolithic service will be nothing but an expensive memory.
I haven’t had cable/satellite for literally years and can’t say as I miss it. A zip subscription (canadian netflix) and bittorrent are enough for me…
Oh, and add to that the library where I work which has excellent dvd selection!
Ah, yes! The library likely has a good selection as well! I think it’ll do the family good to break things down.
The 360 is tough to beat at $199. I wasn’t aware it could stream Netflix.
Personally, I’d go used Mac Mini (or even AppleTV) plus Boxee/Plex & bittorrent. That said, I’ve admittedly become a Mac fan boy.
Boxee, by the way, is awesome. It’s in public alpha, emphasis on alpha, but it’s basically a very pretty XBMC + Internet video (Hulu, YouTube, etc). Definitely worth playing with.
Love Boxee, been using it for the past month on my laptop and have been really liking what they are doing.
An entry level Mac mini could be interesting… I had been thinking about building an SFF Ubuntu box but cost containment has been a challenge and while it’s $600 I can just drop it in. Hmmmm.
I think that I’m going to pick up an HDMI cable and play with my laptop driving the TV as a second monitor and see how Boxee plays out on it.
Ok. Sold.
After conversing with the wife the Xbox is taking a back seat and we are going to get a Mac Mini for the living room and a Roku Netflix Player for the bedroom. Bonus is we could then actually manage our iPhones.
Oh! I didn’t know about GreenCine! I’ll consider than when we start doing DVD rentals. Our university library has an excellent film and video collection that we have access to (the perks of being a grad student and faculty/staff).
Ha! Now I feel guilty for tripling the cost of your solution! I guess the upside is that the Minis seem to have excellent resale value. That said, there’s some speculation about a possible Mini refresh in January.
My HTPC is an Asus P1-AH2 running Ubuntu 8.04. While it gets the job done, it’s certainly not girlfriend or houseguest friendly. A Mini can be controlled with the included Apple remote, a Wiimote or your iPhone, which are all pretty sweet solutions. Netflix streaming works on the Mac now, too, although it wouldn’t be as couch friendly as the 360′s implementation.
@Quyen, GreenCine is a fantastic service and the fact that they donate a portion of profits to support the arts is awesome.
@Tyler, no need for guilt! Actually, reflecting on how we use things a Mini makes much more sense than the 360. I love playing games but the fact of the matter is that I don’t play them enough to justify another console when the Wii hardly gets a workout beyond 2 hours a week.
I’m going to put blinders on for that possible refresh since I’d love to go post-tv before the holidays. :-/