I use Time Warner to provide cable, telephone and broadband and we also have HBO and Showtime. I currently pay about $200/month for all that. My wife was curious if we couldn’t save money by switching to UVerse and I was wondering about using things like AppleTV and switching to using iPhones instead of land-lines. Does anyone have experience with this? What would I be giving up?
Thanks,
Rob
You can do all of this piecemeal, so a better way to ask this question would be “what do I want to be left with”? Otherwise we don’t know what is important to you and cannot provide good advice.
Currently I use Dish Network with their cheapest HD broadcast package, Comcast for internet, Vonage for land line service and Netflix streaming through Roku and DVD delivery. It is probably around $150 in total.
If it weren’t for working from home I wouldn’t even bother with a land line, and did without for many years without missing it at all. Cellular service is good enough for the number of calls I make.
From a TV perspective we are probably quite close to not needing Dish Network, since the only thing we seem to use it for are background noise type shows such as the Food Channel. But you probably wouldn’t want to get rid of this or Cable if watching the latest shows on a regular basis was important to you. On the other hand, Amazon on the Roku rents shows like The Office for $2, so if you only watched one or two shows it would probably be cheaper to buy them on a pay-per-view basis instead.
I watch The Office, Good Eats, HBO and Showtime series, the occasional program on Discovery, the History Channel, etc., and movies on HBO and Showtime on OnDemand. I don’t currently have a cell phone. I don’t watch sporting events. I sometimes catch The Office on NBC.com. My kids love Nick, Cartoon network and Noggn and will attempt to kill me if I cancel those, but I am bigger than they are and well armed. My wife likes stupid reality game shows. Are things like this accessible through things like AppleTV? The one thing I don’t want to give up is broadband.
Thanks,
Rob
I’ve got Broadband and a land line (for international calls)–$65.00/mo. A Pay-as-you-go cell phone ~$8/mo, no cable, and Netflix–$18.00/mo
Total: $81/mo.
Most network (and channels like FX) shows I can get from Hulu for free, Netflix I stream through my laptop connected to my TV. I watch series like MadMen & Curb Your Enthusiasm on DVD, albeit about 6 months after they’re first shown, but so what?
If nothing else, I strongly recommend that you switch to UVERSE if you can. It rules. For a more direct answer to your question, I switched from TWC to uverse and the only thing I lost was the gray hair I got from dealing with TWC.
I do have to say that the customer service that I get with TWC is excellent. Also, I use my road runner address for a lot of user names which was stupid of me.
I just called TWC up and told them I wanted to reduce some of my expenses and wanted to cancel. Voila! They could switch me to a cheaper package with no reduction of services. :dubious: So call them and see if you can save any money by staying with them.
I suggest you repeat this sentence to your wife. The resulting mayhem is bound to destroy the TV, or possibly your ability to watch it, and so you can cancel a lot of stuff 
I did the same thing and was told to get bent. We cancelled on the spot. Frakkin’ Time Warner.
BTW, here is another thread where people talk about how they get their TV fix without cable:
I dropped Comcast last year for internet/cable and went with DirecTV and bundled DSL/phone from our local phone company. Saved about $40/month, with more channels and way better reliability and customer service. Comcast sucks.
We’d save even more if we dropped the landline, but old habits are hard to break.
Over the summer we switched from Comcast to a bundled TV/phone/broadband service with AT&T U-verse. We get more than we did before, at a somewhat cheaper cost. And the service has been very good.
For UVerse (in the Chicago suburbs), for HD cable, wireless broadband, no movie channels, DVR with simultaneous 4-channel recording, we pay $100. Phone is AT&T but separate. We switched from Comcast, which charged us nearly $150 for the same thing, crappier reception, frequent connection drops, and only 2-simultaneous-channel DVR recording. I also pay about $15 a month for Netflix, 2 DVDs out at a time package, plus since I have a PS3 I ordered and got a free DVD that allows the PS3 to stream any of their “streamable” movies on our TV, rather than watching them on a dinky computer screen. The performance has been excellent. Most movies are not streamable but the number is increasing every day, it feels like. XBox has a similar feature.