We’re cutting our cable, part II

On Wednesday we shared about our decision to cut our cable service (provided by AT&T U-verse) to the just the basic major networks.  Our story continues…

This decision was prompted further by an awesome Christmas gift that I received this holiday season.  It’s a called the Roku Digital Video Player, and it’s from a company founded by the same guy who is responsible for something called the Tivo.  Roku came out as a device primarily intended to function as a hub for Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” feature, bypassing your computer as a means of getting that content on the TV.   Netflix has something like 17,000 movies and TV episodes available to stream at the press of a button.

So this Roku HD-XR box (we ended up with the most feature-endowed box of the bunch) gets us a ton of content for free, with Netflix costing us just $8.99/month.  We also get one DVD at-a-time from Netflix as usual.  Roku also has deals with Amazon Video On Demand, Pandora, and Flickr, among others.  It also includes access to video content from my favorite internet TV network called TWiT, which focuses mainly on technology, consumer electronics, and our friends at Apple.

Now, you might be thinking, well that’s great, but aren’t using just substituting new content for what you were already spending money on? You’d think so, but here’s what we’ve seen to be the outcome:

• Network TV is great and all, but there are just a few shows that we watch weekly, so we don’t end up watching the networks that much
• There are some great sitcoms available for Netflix streaming, so we just watch 1 or 2 of those, at most, each day
• Through Netflix and other content providers, we’re getting access to a ton of educational content, so that can’t be bad, right?  (Yeah, we’re not sure this one holds much water, either.)
• We’ve saved 30 bucks per month, even with the addition of a Netflix subscription

We’re finding that the TV is on way less, and we are feeling more inclined to talk at the dinner table (shamefully, we had made somewhat of a habit of eating dinner in front of the TV before), get and read books from the library, study and grow in our faith, and just spend more time enjoying peace and quiet.  Our screen time is no longer a given; instead, we tend to turn the TV on only when there’s something worth watching.  To sum things up, we don’t miss the Food Network as much as we thought we would.