Cancel Cable Without Losing Your Favorite Shows

By consumeristcarey February 21, 2009

Cable is one of the first things you should cut to keep expenses down, but that doesn’t mean you should ditch your favorite shows. J.D. over at Get Rich Slowly cut his cable bill from $65.82 to $11.30 without missing a single harrowing plot twist. Here’s how he did it…

J.D. basically designed his own à la carte programming instead of paying for a mess of unnecessary cable channels. He relied on two resources:

  • iTunes: “Since we started, we’ve purchased eleven “seasons” from iTunes, totaling $398.42 (or about $36.22 per season). This works out to about $16.60 per month. When added to our $11.30 basic cable bill, we’re paying $27.90 each month for television. That’s less than half of what we were paying before.”
  • Hulu: Every respectable network streams their shows, and Hulu is one of the better spots to watch full episodes online. Anyone outside the U.S. or in need of more obscure shows can also try SurfTheChannel.

How I Cut My Television Bill in Half [Get Rich Slowly]
(Photo: jonny.hunter)

[Ed. Previously this post had a mention about Bittorrent. It has been removed. Consumerist does not advocate piracy.

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Comments

  1. lonebannana says:
    February 23, 2009 at 3:55 pm

    Or “DO WHAT I DO” and rent the whole season on DVD. Did that with Sopranos. Did that with almost all the seasons of 24. SO much better without commercials.

    Or Hulu, or whatever.

    (TRIED to watch LOST from the first season DVDs; couldn’t stand it)

  2. synergy says:
    February 25, 2009 at 3:41 am

    Oh thanks for that link! I found a show I’d been looking for all afternoon which I missed last week. heh

  3. Hector De Jesus says:
    February 25, 2009 at 8:29 pm

    I know that being thrifty and saving money is chic right now but c’mon… I pay $45 for HD cable and an HD-DVR and another $35 for 6mbps internet. I have access to stream anything I want from Hulu or whatever and I can record whatever comes on cable and PPV. In addition, I pay $10 per month for a basic Netflix subscription in which I can stream unlimited movies to my Xbox in high quality. Oh… and there’s always Redbox for immediate gratification…

    So I’m basically paying about $100 a month for WHATEVER I could desire in a HIGH-QUALITY format to view whenever I want with no contracts. Sure, you can DL bad-quality, illegal torrents from LimeWire and crap from iTunes for about $30-35 a month… or… just pay $45 for HD cable with a HD-DVR for $10 more… WTF.

    You might as well tell people to buy VHS tapes again and tape things from the TV like we did 25 years ago… Hmmm… that would save some money!

  4. QuillanPrice says:
    June 11, 2009 at 6:39 pm

    don’t forget http://www.fancast.com

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