Cutting The Cord On TV and Communication
I am usually a loyal customer of whatever service I subscribe to. Recently, I realized that the slow creep of price increases from all the services I get can't be justified anymore. Phone and cable companies were sneaky in bundling services to give you an initial "great deal" when you first sign up with them. For example, when I first signed up with TWC about four years ago, I received a bundled deal, combining my home phone, Wifi, and Cable TV standard package all for the monthly price of about $120, or $1440 annually. I kept my alarm company, Total Protection at an annual cost of $436. Alarm was connected to the phone line, which was necessary to reach the phone company and police monitoring system in case a home burglary is in progress.
Two years later, TWC which got bought out by Spectrum, informs me that my initial deal offer had expired, and the same bundled service I subscribed to cost $179 per month, or $2148 per year. I kept paying this new price because I was too lazy to investigate and research for alternatives. Come January 2018, I logged into my account for some reason, and realized that the price increased again, this time to $199 a month, or $2388 annually. This just seems excessive for keeping a landline that exists only for the alarm system because otherwise we've been receiving only spam solicitation calls and political robo calls during election season.
On top of that, the Standard TV package doesn't seem to be so necessary anymore. We had that package back in the day when the kids were young and wanted to watch Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon. I watched CNN, CNBC and MSNBC. My husband wanted to watch all the college and pro football games. Now that the kids are away in college. I get most of my news from the internet. Watching cable news, while reinforcing my political beliefs, is pretty much just indulging in partisan and biased politics whether it's watching CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. Much as I like Don Lemon, Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow, I guess I can do without them too. After showing him our new cable bill, my husband finally said enough is enough. He can do without live football andwill just watch it on network TV when it's available. As for movies, we already subscribe to Netflix for $9.99 per month, and we get all the movies and TV shows we care to watch. After all, how long do we need to stare at the TV screen every night?
So the alternative? After some research, we decided to switch to "a la carte" Sling TV, which gives us one week free of charge to explore and test it. It's a pay by the month TV service that allows you to download its app onto your streaming device, whether it's a Roku, or your cell phone. It gives you bare bones number of channels but still has news channels like CNN and Bloomberg TV, HGTV, AMC, TNT, Food Network,History Channel, Travel Chanel, Comedy Central, etc. For kids, I can get Cartoon Network, and Disney Channel. I can even get ESPN for some football and basketball games, but just not all games. How much does this all cost? $20 per month, or $240 a year. As for local or network channels such as your ABC, NBC and CBS channels, Sling TV is definitely lacking in that area. However, if you use an antennas to connect your TV to it, you can still watch those channels like in the olden days, for free. In fact, with Sling TV, you get a new antenna or a streaming ROKU box for free if you sign up and prepay its services for two months, which will come out to $60.
We are testing out Sling TV for free right now for seven days. So far, we are happy with it. We've always had a TV antenna, so we connected it to our TV and sure enough, we can actually get all the local channels with no problems. The only snag is, we still need a wifi connection. In my area, the best wifi connection and speed (100 mbps) we can get is still from Spectrum, yet if we unbundle Spectrum services to just receive wifi in the future, we are looking at $69 per month or $828 annually, This is a cost that we may not be able to avoid.
As for savings, this is what we are looking at:
Keeping our old Spectrum TV, Wifi, and Phone subscription: $2388 annually.
Getting rid of Spectrum TV and phone but keeping Wifi ($828) and subcribing to Sling TV ($240) and adding an extra $48 per year to upgrade our alarm system to use cellular connection as opposed to phone line connection bring the total cost of cutting the corporate cord to $1116 annually. This is a $1272, or a 53% savings over what I've been paying. On top of that, if I pre-pay Sling TV for 2 months, I get an RCA Antenna device valued at $45 for free. The antenna I can use on my second TV to get local and network channels. With the thousands of dollars we are saving, we can replace our 18 year old TV too.
Sounds like a no brainer to me.
As for communications, we mostly use our cell phones now, so we will continue to communicate that way. Most of our friends, family and service providers prefer to communicate with us by calling our cell phones or via text anyway, so ridding us of the landline shouldn't be a burden at all. I bet I'll remember forever the land line number that we've had for three decades. Sad, but this is truly the end of an era.
On top of that, the Standard TV package doesn't seem to be so necessary anymore. We had that package back in the day when the kids were young and wanted to watch Cartoon Network, Disney Channel, Nickelodeon. I watched CNN, CNBC and MSNBC. My husband wanted to watch all the college and pro football games. Now that the kids are away in college. I get most of my news from the internet. Watching cable news, while reinforcing my political beliefs, is pretty much just indulging in partisan and biased politics whether it's watching CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. Much as I like Don Lemon, Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow, I guess I can do without them too. After showing him our new cable bill, my husband finally said enough is enough. He can do without live football andwill just watch it on network TV when it's available. As for movies, we already subscribe to Netflix for $9.99 per month, and we get all the movies and TV shows we care to watch. After all, how long do we need to stare at the TV screen every night?
So the alternative? After some research, we decided to switch to "a la carte" Sling TV, which gives us one week free of charge to explore and test it. It's a pay by the month TV service that allows you to download its app onto your streaming device, whether it's a Roku, or your cell phone. It gives you bare bones number of channels but still has news channels like CNN and Bloomberg TV, HGTV, AMC, TNT, Food Network,History Channel, Travel Chanel, Comedy Central, etc. For kids, I can get Cartoon Network, and Disney Channel. I can even get ESPN for some football and basketball games, but just not all games. How much does this all cost? $20 per month, or $240 a year. As for local or network channels such as your ABC, NBC and CBS channels, Sling TV is definitely lacking in that area. However, if you use an antennas to connect your TV to it, you can still watch those channels like in the olden days, for free. In fact, with Sling TV, you get a new antenna or a streaming ROKU box for free if you sign up and prepay its services for two months, which will come out to $60.
We are testing out Sling TV for free right now for seven days. So far, we are happy with it. We've always had a TV antenna, so we connected it to our TV and sure enough, we can actually get all the local channels with no problems. The only snag is, we still need a wifi connection. In my area, the best wifi connection and speed (100 mbps) we can get is still from Spectrum, yet if we unbundle Spectrum services to just receive wifi in the future, we are looking at $69 per month or $828 annually, This is a cost that we may not be able to avoid.
As for savings, this is what we are looking at:
Keeping our old Spectrum TV, Wifi, and Phone subscription: $2388 annually.
Getting rid of Spectrum TV and phone but keeping Wifi ($828) and subcribing to Sling TV ($240) and adding an extra $48 per year to upgrade our alarm system to use cellular connection as opposed to phone line connection bring the total cost of cutting the corporate cord to $1116 annually. This is a $1272, or a 53% savings over what I've been paying. On top of that, if I pre-pay Sling TV for 2 months, I get an RCA Antenna device valued at $45 for free. The antenna I can use on my second TV to get local and network channels. With the thousands of dollars we are saving, we can replace our 18 year old TV too.
Sounds like a no brainer to me.
As for communications, we mostly use our cell phones now, so we will continue to communicate that way. Most of our friends, family and service providers prefer to communicate with us by calling our cell phones or via text anyway, so ridding us of the landline shouldn't be a burden at all. I bet I'll remember forever the land line number that we've had for three decades. Sad, but this is truly the end of an era.
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