I recently started reviewing my monthly expenses in order to slow the large black hole of doom that was eating my cash faster than I could make it. While looking over the bills, I stopped at the Comcast bill. I’m giving them about $150 a month…and that’s just way too much. I have expanded basic or whatever they call it, the HD tier, a DVR, and internet service. Now as far as watching TV, I only have a couple of shows that really hold my interest. So I set out to think about alternatives.
I wrote about Hulu before here at SBR and that immediately sprang to mind. I ran over to the site to check on what they’ve got these days. Among a great number of old shows (Invisible Man FTW!), they also have Chuck and Heroes and Eureka. That pretty much covers what I watch with the exception of Dr. Who and Good Eats. I have no doubts that I can watch Dr. Who online. I may have to give up on Good Eats, though since it appears Food Network doesn’t have any known intention to offer streaming of their programs. So it came down to watching 5 shows on my HDTV for $150 a month or watching them on my laptop or iMac for $50 a month. Why in the world would anyone give an extra $100 a month just to get a bigger picture. $1200 a year will buy you a really large monitor if it’s that important to you.
So I ask, with the advent of sites such as Hulu and with most of the major networks streaming recent episodes of their shows…why does anyone need to pay the horribly overpriced cable fees? Why do we need to feed that mafia extortion ring any longer? With minimal work you can easily ditch the racket fees and enjoy actually having a little money in your pocket. If you really want to get fancy with it, you can connect your PC/Mac to the TV and watch it there. Heck, you can build your own DVR with almost no work at all these days. What we need to do is send a message to the cable companies. We need to let them know that they charge too much for what really is crappy service and even worse programming. I’ll give them $30 a month for those services…but not a penny more. So if they don’t like it, I’ll be happily streaming my programming without the need to invest in mafia protection rackets.