Incoherently.net

A few months ago I talked my wife into dumping our satellite provider and making the switch to getting all our television content streamed. We picked up 2 Apple TV’s, one for each Television in our household, and decided to give it a go with just Netflix and iTunes.

First off, why’d we make the switch? Well, for most this is pretty obvious. If you’re the one in your family that’s opening those Satellite or Cable bills every month then you know how frustrating the nickel and diming that these companies do can be. The package itself seems reasonable, sure $79 for a billion channels, that sounds great. But when you add in the taxes, $10 monthly fee for having HD receivers, the $5 per receiver, and all the other nonsense you end up with a bill that’s closer to $120.

The reason we switched is simple, I did the math. We don’t watch a ton of TV and have actually stopped most “random” TV watching over the last few years. Oh, if we have it, we watch it. But there wasn’t anything that we look back at now and feel like we really lost.

I figured that Netflix (roughly $8 a month for their streaming package last I checked) had plenty of stuff for the kids and it turns out I was right on that account. I had about 100 different Shows and Movies in my Instant Queue that I’d always meant to get to but never really got around to also, now I get around to those when I don’t have access to random TV.

The math I did was this, I figured that there were maybe 2-3 shows on average at any given time that were putting out new episodes weekly that we actually watch. At $2.99 a pop through iTunes that’s about $9 per week or $36 a month. Buying Season Passes gives a discount, and buying iTunes Gift Cards through Plastic Jungle gives another discount.

I figured that even if we ended up buying twice that much through iTunes we’d still be paying half as much as we were with Satellite. With the $99 price tag of the Apple TV I didn’t have to worry about it taking several months for them to pay for themselves either. They actually paid for themselves within 2 months because as it turns out, I had actually overestimated how many TV episodes we would buy through iTunes.

It turns out that when you pay per episode you tend to stop and consider whether or not it’s really worth it. We quickly shed quite a few shows that we just didn’t feel made the cut. Not only did this save us even more money in the end but it’s also given us quite a bit of time back.

The other benefit is that I’ve finally gotten around to watching some of those shows that people had been recommending to me for so long like Sons of Anarchy and Arrested Development.

I added Hulu Plus to our streaming library recently via the 1-week free trial. I have some pretty mixed feelings about their whole model as compared to Netflix, but I’ll get into that more in a future post.