Unthinkability

Why on earth do we pay the cableco $700/year to watch repeats when we have this media system in our house? I am on a mission to quit cable TV. The rest of the family is not too sure.

My wife likes several shows on several cable networks; Hoarders on A&E, Challenge on The Food Network, and the endless reruns of CSI:Whatever on whichever channels.  I also like the Futurama reruns on Comdey Central, and the Battlestar Galactica franschise on SyFy.  The startling revelation is: we can buy 20 seasons’ worth of DVDs for the price we pay for cable in a year ($700).

Sure these are tough economic times for everyone, but that is not my primary motivation.  My main goal is to get “Zach & Cody On Deck,” “iCarly,” “Hannah Montana,” and “Wizards of Waverly Place” out of my house.  The money savings is just a perk.

We have hundreds of books, broadband internet (via cable), an XBOX 360, Rock Band and Guitar Hero, two Ninetndo DS Lites, three laptops, a couple of Zunes, board games, Netflix, RedBox, and a Windows Media Center feeding this house.  Yet, I often find my kids staring agape at some rerun of some insipid Disney Channel show.  I am calling it.  The End!

I just built this antenna and put it up on our garage roof (mostly hidden from view).  It is a homemade UHF antenna for receiving over-the-air TV broadcasts. The Hoverman design is popular with the do-it-yourself crowd, and this simplified version is from www.makezine.com.  You can go full-blown if you want to, but the simple version is working for us at the moment.

I disconnected the cable from the main house feed 20 minutes ago.  I connected the Hoverman antenna to an RF amplifier, and connected the amp to the main house feed.  Viola!  (Note to self: there are two TVs in the house that are still analog, so they will be Media Center-only TVs, or I’ll need to get off-air converter boxes.)

If you think that I am brave, you need to know that I am cheating.  My wife is not all-the-way on board with the plan, but she agreed to try it with the kids for a while.  The Media Center is still connected to the cable company, and it will still record shows from the cableco;  I have not cancelled our cable service yet.  She’ll still be able to watch her shows if she sets the Media Center to record them.

So, the saga continues.  The next step is to live without cable on the televisions for a week or two and see how it goes.  I need to find answers to my wife’s concerns (Hoarders, Challenge, etc), and need to find a converter box for her laundry room TV.  After that, I hope to completely cut the cord on the CableTV and cancel our cable (though we’ll continue to use and pay for business broadband internet service).

My stance: Our house cannot function without paper towels.  Everything else is negotiable.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2010 at 1:09 pm and is filed under A Geek Dad's Life, Blog Posts, Quitting Cable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.