It has been awhile since I posted, but there have been busy nights at work, exhausted mornings, hangovers, a sick kid, and spring cleaning. A girl only has so much time in a day, right? Mixed in with all of this was bill paying.
Every time I grab my cable bill I want to vomit. We have a bundle and it runs over $200 a month. It is sickening really. We pay for a home phone that we don't use now that Chloe has her own phone and we rarely watch the cable except for news, Walking Dead, and the background noise of Pickers or Pawn Stars. Frankly, it is a waste of money. I mentioned it again this week and with us being a fairly media driven family it met with some resistance. There has to be other options out there.
So with a bit of investigation on Michael's part we have been trying out a "cable free" weekend. We recently purchased the Amazon Prime Fire Stick which has a lot of great streaming options...especially nerdy PBS documentaries and shows of that nature.
We downloaded Hulu Plus for a free trial as well as Sling TV. We have also had Netflix for a long time. All of these options use the internet only for their function. I have to say that we successfully made it through the weekend without even a hint of needing cable.
Sling TV is very new and just launched in February. It can be a bit clunky if you don't have high speed internet or if you have unapproved side apps loaded to your Fire Stick. Once we removed those side apps we had one hiccup in 3 days. That is pretty damn good. On Sling TV you can watch shows in real time as long it is on a network they offer. There are packages you can buy for $5 a month which include sports, movies, and kids channels. They have recently acquired a slew of History Channel shows as well. This, my friends, is the wave of the future.
Hulu Plus is probably the gem of the bunch though. It has Criterion Collection, great old shows from childhood, as well as ongoing new shows. We have watch TV this weekend mostly. We are pretty impressed with the selection they offer. The kiddo is in heaven with more anime than she ever knew existed. This is a family pleasing streaming site.
I'm hoping that this puts an end to the long periods of scrolling through a million cable channels to find something to watch. It will also save us $100 a month on our bill which we can put towards a nice family vacation. Getting older sometimes means making life more simple and approaching it from a smarter stand point. Summer is coming and I am hoping to not be in front of the TV anyway. There will be nights we lounge in the air conditioning and binge on shows....hell there might be super hot days we do that too, but all in all it will feel better than cable.
People that are giving up cable for streaming options are known as "cord cutters". We kind of like the sound of that. It makes us feel a bit nostalgic for our rebellious days...even if it is just ousting cable. It is like not being a slave to the man in a way. Bucking the system. Check it out.
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