Cutting The Cable

The question is not IF but WHEN to cut off cable service

Cutting off the cable company is a right of passage into the new age of television. With $7.99 a month Netflix account, you get better television programs and movies to watch in HD, no commercials while save $100 a month.

Our extended family are almost exclusively watching Netflix and not cable. If you want the latest shows, movies or sports to watch, cable and Pay-Per-View are still the standard way to get that content.

There are other complicated technical solutions to free TV described in a Forbes article. We like the simplicity of Netflix.

How to Sign-up

Sign-up to Netflix is free for the first month and $7.99 per month for SD or HD services. Two devices in the same family can watch TV at the same time.

Netflix Sign-up screen

You just need an email address, credit card or PayPal account, secure password and compatible device to sign up.  Most new TV’s include a Netflix client but if your TV does not support Netflix, you can get Netflix on a variety of devices like a Roku 3 Streaming Media Player , Xbox, PS3, Wii, PC, most smartphones, and tablets.  For that matter, Netflix will pay for itself in 3 or 4 months if you buy a new TV.

Netflix is testing a new $6.99-per-month pricing for a single user and 4-user pricing at $11.99 per month. According to Netflix not everyone will see the new pricing so it’s $7.99 until you hear differently. The value at $7.99 is so great I can’t see how they will not find a way to get extra revenue.

Living with Netflix

Since you can watch episodes of a TV series one after the other, you don’t have to remember what happened last week. The weekend Netflix binge has become the new rage.

We cut the cable last year because we got sick of wasting Saturday night hunting for something decent to watch on our 200 channels of HD TV.

About a year before that, we joined 40 million people around the world and gave Netflix $7.99 a month for more movies and TV shows we can watch in a lifetime.

Last September, I called the cable company, thanked them for their service and gave them 30 days notice. We also cancelled the land-line phone since everyone has a cellphone. We saved about $120 a month and no longer have to answer phone calls during meals.

Netflix

I wish I had invested in Netflix when before their stock rose from $70 in 2012 to more than $300 today.  The company almost owns this space although competitors are trying to catch up.

Netflix Home Screen

Netflix in Canada is not as good as the US, they say, but we haven’t hit the bottom of the list of shows to watch yet. And we don’t have to wade through commercials and reality shows about redneck hunters of ducks, alligators or bail jumpers.  One of my sons who likes first run movies is bored with Netflix so not everyone finds the content enough.  He was the one who got us interested.

Some of the original programming on Netflix is awesome like the award-winning “House of Cards.” They also have original US, Canadian, and foreign movies, television shows and a variety of British movies and television programs. It seems to be a bottomless pit of interesting things to watch.  If you insist on watching the very latest movies and shows, however, Netflix may not be your cup of tea.

Netflix profiles your viewing habits and makes suggestions based on that pattern for new movies and shows to watch.  It also tracks the recently watched shows which can help you find what you were watching last night by episode.  This means you can monitor your family viewing and they can see yours.

We did keep the Bell Aliant Fiber-Op high-speed internet service so Netflix is showing HD 1080 video. FiberOp download speeds are an amazing 79Mpbs and uploads 27Mbps.

The last straw with cable TV was the CRTC arguing about what channels we had to pay for. I don’t want the specialty channels forced down my throat. If I need to know something, I can always look it up on Wikipedia or another internet site. We both read the news on our smartphones and tablets so waiting for the television news stopped being a ritual years ago.

Our Sony TV is a so-called Smart TV and has other services along with Netflix like Crackle, which carries the excellent Seinfeld show “Comedians in Cars for Coffee”.  Before that TV, we used a Blu-Ray player as the Netflix client.  Some audio receivers include Netflix as well.

The next investment in the no-cable world will be a $90 Roku 3 Streaming Media Player, which brings many of the regular TV channels to your set. A Roku only costs one month’s cable bill.

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