We cancelled cable in 2009 as a cost-cutting measure as I wasn’t working. I swore up and down that as soon as I got a job it was going back on.
Got a job, realized I didn’t care about it at all. Never turned it on again, reveled in the savings. We have a Roku with Netflix and Amazon Prime. I also watch the PBS channel a fair bit.
Is Amazon Prime subscription based, or do you pay for individual movies/shows?
We’ve started watching Top Gear about 3-4 years ago and have never seen the earlier episodes. So if they’re on Amazon Prime I’d definitely consider subbing to it (depending on what else is available).
That’s where I’m at right now. I have basic cable and internet. I don’t want cable. I do everything online, but having basic cable saves me 20/month on bill, even though we never watch it. Honestly, if we didn’t even have it hooked up we wouldn’t notice.
It’s an annual subscription that comes with many other benefits, such as free two-day shipping on most amazon orders, free ebook lending, and some other stuff. We have it for the shipping plan, the streaming is just a bonus.
One thing that I like about Amazon instant watch is you can rent movies (I watch maybe one every three months) and buy shows. I buy every episode of Adventure Time and Archer as they’re released, as those are my two favorite shows.
We dumped DirecTV (which we liked) and went with Roku about a year ago. We use an antenna for live network broadcasts (mainly local news).
The Roku channels we view the most are Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon (we have Prime). Occasionally we’ll have Pandora going. We also subscribe to HBONow, and I’m hoping that it becomes available on Roku when it’s exclusive deal with Apple TV expires in a few months.
The only thing I really miss is Big 10 football, but I feel like it’s only a matter of time before they work out a deal to make that available by subscription also.
For those who have ditched cable how do you get live sports?
I would desperately miss live EPL and especially NFL Redzone.
We cut the cord two years ago. We went from a $70/month bill to $16 for Apple TV with Hulu and netflix. Does it get everything? No. Live tv is out. We bought a digital antenna which works ok but isn’t quite the same. And we often have to wait a year (or longer) for new shows to hit Netflix, though Apple TV has gotten better of late on adding in new channels. Things like FXNow or History or random things like Yahoo Screen (yay Community!) or TED talks.
And now Internet is no problem either. We’re a year into Google paying $25/month. That’s about to drop to $0.
So we went from around $120 per month two years ago to what will soon be $16. I’ll take that along with the very few negatives of the system.
Sling TV has ESPN.
Oh, if you use Bing as your search browser you can sign up for Bing Rewards. They give you points per search. With, I think, 500 points you can get a $5 Amazon gift card or you can get a month of Hulu for free. I get the latter. It saves me 8 bucks a month.
For the most part, you don’t. It’s the only thing I miss about cable. I could pay $150 a year for MLB.tv, but I’m a Cardinals fan and that price will get me every game except Cardinals games. You can try a proxy that makes the website think you live elsewhere, but I haven’t tried that because I don’t want to pay $150 for an experiment. There used to be a handful of games a year on network TV, but now every game, even the playoffs, are on cable. The World Series is still over the air, but I wouldn’t bet on it staying that way for long.
Other sports’ mileage may vary. I think you still get a few NFL and college basketball games on regular TV.
Yes to both parts of your question.
When you have an Amazon Prime membership, movies and TV shows fall into three categories and the seem to float back and forth between the categories.
I have purchased a few movies that I knew I’d watch again; and also things like Justified where I purchased the entire season for around $20-30.
Amazon Prime no longer has the Top Gear episodes from the BBC for free streaming.
Cut the cable two weeks ago. Also cancelled Netflix, which never had the movies we wanted anyway. Now we stream everything, and it’s wonderful.
I stream a ton, but I do not, and will not, “rent” any movies for streaming.
Why?
Because the local video shop, which has been driven out of business by streaming, somehow managed to buy VHS tapes and DVD discs, pay rent on a brick and mortar store, pay for heat and lights and more importantly pay wages to a full crew of employees for a fraction of the price these companies want to charge me to stream a file from a server! Seriously, why should I pay $3 to $5 for the same movie Mom and Pop’s Video Shop charged me $1 to rent?
Screw you Amazon!
I use ProXPN.I have the commercial version, but they have a free one as well. You could try streaming one of their games and see if it works for you. I can say that their commercial version works quite well and painlessly.
Also, theHola! browser app, which is free, might work well for you.
How do I stream from my laptop to our TV? I refuse to watch a game on my laptop and our ISP is so craptastic anyway that I can only imagine all the pixelating and freezing.
It all depends on the outputs of your laptop and the inputs of your TV. Newer laptops and TVs will have HDMI inputs and outputs, which carry HD video signal and stereo sound. This makes life very siimple – you can get a 25’ cable for under 20 bucks. Otherwise, you may have to run multiple cables that may need different types of connectors at each end.
Last time I looked at something wireless to get my laptop AV fto my TV, the options were either very expensive or got review comments that they were junk.
Coincidentally, I just saw something online yesterday on this – how to use your iPhone as a streaming device. You just buy a dongle with a lightning connector on one end, and an HDMI jack on the other.
Since you are able to borrow from your daughter’s HBO account as an authorized user, chances are you can get ESPN streaming with their app through her subscription also. A family member made us an authorized user on their Time Warner account so we could use HBO Go to catch up on Game of Thrones - turns out the login will authorize ESPN on Roku and FoxNow/FXNow as well.
We’ve been without cable for about 2 years. I miss it every so often but I can use the TWC login or a Comcast Xfinity login to stream things as well. Between that, Netflix, the Amazon Prime shows (which mostly is what the kids use) and our Plex server, we get by pretty well. Heck, on anything you can stream youtube on you can even type in “Show Full Episodes” and get some options. We watch a lot of music videos and clips of things too - the kids and I spent 3 hours the other night watching Dude Perfect.
Before we switched to all Rokus and game systems (PS3/xbox360) we used to play things right on the laptop and plug it in to the TV - it just required using a monitor cable and an audio cable to get from one to the other.
Every time I miss the cable shows we had before, I just watch something at my parent’s house for an hour. As soon as that’s over, I’m so sick of the commercials that I don’t worry about it so much.
Brendon
Thankfully, this is not one of the areas where I over think it. 
In other words It doesn’t bother me that the local video shop, that I had to drive to, has been ‘driven out of business’ by streaming services. This is quite a bit different (to me, anyway) than a mom and pop toy store being driven out of business by a new Wal-Mart. The streaming video rentals are about the same as what I used to pay at a video rental place; except a LOT more convenient.
TLDR: It doesn’t bother me to pay a few bucks for a streaming video rental