I Refuse to Give in and Subscribe to HD Cable

I think I may have some sort of split personality disorder.  While I’ve been working hard to lock down our spending, I’ve also found myself “giving in” to a few desires.  One of those desires is a new 47” LCD TV from Costco.

For the last 7 years we’ve been using the old picture tube TV that was in our house when we bought it.  It has worked fine but the picture isn’t very good so we’ve been watching the LCD prices and waiting for them to come down to a more reasonable level before replacing it.  We finally found what I believe is a good solid value at Costco and pulled the trigger.

The picture on the new TV is amazing when watching movies and using the Xbox but the cable TV picture is subpar.  The problem with getting a TV like this is it causes additional desires to pop up.  Why have a great TV and a crappy cable TV signal?

I decided to call Comcast and find out how much it would cost to bump up our cable package to HD (high definition).  I was hoping it was under $10 a month extra but it turns out that it would cost somewhere around $20 a month extra.  Argghh.  So, I have to pay them $20 more a month to have them improve their signal to me?

If there’s one thing I hate in life, it’s monthly bills.  I hate watching our lifestyle creep up causing more and more monthly commitments.  I’ve worked hard over the years to minimize our monthly bills because I think it’s the number one way that money trickles out of our bank account.

After having thought about it for quite awhile, I decided I’m not going to give Comcast any more money.  Here’s what we are doing:

I put a high quality splitter on the coax cable coming out of the wall so that we can get a signal through the cable box AND directly through the wire.  By utilizing multiple inputs on the back of the new TV we can now watch the local channels in high definition, and still get all the other channels in the std definition format.  The reality is that we don’t watch a lot of live TV so this will work out fine.

We have also decided to start watching the majority of our shows through Netflix on the Xbox.  We are paying $8.99 a month for one movie at a time through the mail and that gives us unlimited movie streaming through the Xbox.  I was surprised to find that they have added a TON of new TV series on Netflix so we won’t be running out of programming to watch.  I’m also thrilled to see that there is a LOT of HD programming on Netflix.  We’re finding all kinds of new and interesting programming that we would have never seen if we’d stuck to the traditional model of paying for hundreds of channels that we never watch.  Instead, we are using a much more “pull” based approach to TV watching and we’re really liking it.  The $8.99 a month that we are spending on Netflix is turning out to be a much better value than I ever realized and I’ve managed to avoid seeing our monthly bills pop up another $20.