Cutting the cable box

Cable TV costs too much – so I’m dropping it in favor of streaming Internet video.

At the end of March, my six-month promo deal with Midcontinent Communications – a telecom company serving North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota – ran out. For $82/month, I got fast Internet access – 20 Mbps download speed, faster than most of my big city friends have – and the “theatre DVR suite,” with the deluxe 200-channel cable package, HBO, a DVR and a high definition receiver.

That will cost me around $125/month starting in April.

I looked at a la carte options. Keeping my same level of Internet access would run me $40 – a pretty good deal.

Keeping my same cable package would cost $85/month. Midcontinent isn’t actually saving me any money with their supposed bundle.

If I ditched the DVR and just got the deluxe cable package, that would cost me $58/month – plus another $8/month to keep getting hi-def shows for my 42” flatscreen.

Okay, I said, while working through the options with the Midcontinent phone guy. I don’t really need 200 channels. I barely watch five channels with any regularity. I’ll drop down to basic cable.

Sure! he said. There’s just one catch: we don’t offer HD access with our basic cable package.

Basic cable would cost me $48/month, plus $4/month for a cable box. Basic cable plus Internet would bring me to about $95/month for significantly less than what I just got for $82.

So I took a moment to think about what I’m getting out of this. $40 per month for Internet access is a great deal. I use my Internet connection for anywhere from two to six hours per day during the week, and sometimes all day on weekends. Picking a conservative weekend/weekday average of four hours per day, that’s about $.33 per hour.

Cable? Not so much. I’ll go a lot of days without ever watching a live TV show. Picking a generous estimate of an hour per day of TV watching, $52 for basic cable is about $1.75 per hour. Which is a lot more, but still a pretty decent deal compared to most out-of-home entertainment like seeing a movie in theaters or going to a professional sports game or concert.

Except that the vast majority of the TV watching I do do is sports – and, in particular baseball. And for $25/month I can get high-definition streaming video of baseball games (minus games involving the Twins and Rockies, due to Major League Baseballs antiquated blackout rules) through the MLB.TV service. And I can still take advantage of my HD TV – my desktop’s plugged directly into it.

Dropping cable and signing up for MLB.TV will save me $25/month, or $300/year, and there’s a lot I can do with that. (Like, say, almost offset the cost of my company’s mandatory one-week furlough this summer.)

There will be some drawbacks – I won’t be able to host, say, NFL viewing parties like I did last year, but fortunately there aren’t likely to be any NFL games to watch this year. And I’ll still be able to watch DVDs, TV shows on Hulu and other sites, and rented movies from Amazon On Demand. If I feel I need more content, Hulu Plus and Netflix streaming are each around $10 – which is still less than what I would pay for cable.

So goodbye, DVR. Goodbye, cable box. Goodbye, big monthly bills. It was nice knowing you, but my new girl the Internet has a lot more to offer.