Bye, Bye Cable TV - Take Back Control

I just reduced my family's monthly cable TV expense from a nose bleed inducing $207 per month to a "are you for real?" $35 a month. How?

I switched from cable TV to "over the air" TV. I held onto our cable provider for internet access and dropped our home phone but as far as regular TV goes, that's now free. And the picture is HD and spectacular. While our channel selection is a fraction of what it used to be, did we really need three different versions of ESPNU?, we do not miss any of it and for any "premium experience" we use Amazon Fire to access Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. While the Netflix and other subscriptions amount to approximately $30 a month, we're going to drop one of them, technically our bill for "TV" is $65 a month but what we cut each month to the cable company is now just $35 a month instead of $207.

Now, before I went "off the grid", I spoke to my cable provider about reducing our bill. Just like that, they offered a whopping $25 a month discount for one year. After a year they'd jack it back up again. Lovely.

Next I asked about them taking us off their "Signature Plus" plan - that dropped our bill to $152 a month. Still not enough. When I asked what their least expensive plan was they offered me something called "Limited Basic". With "Limited Basic", internet, and no home phone our bill would drop to $55 a month. While I understood that "Limited Basic" would give me just local TV stations and I'd lose my precious DVR's, frankly, they're one of the few things that are worth the money, I made an appointment for a service tech to come to my house and remove everything. It also meant no fancy , all in one remote controls too. Speaking of cable controllers, who remembers tripping over the cable for these old Jerrold boxes?

First pothole we hit was that "Limited Basic" isn't HD - the picture was flat and lifeless, as if something wasn't quite right. I felt like we were back in the 1960's. The only way to get HD would be to go with their "Basic" plan which needs another special converter and would push our bill up to about $110 a month. But of course. In fairness, "Basic" comes with a fair amount of channels - it's not bare bones like "Limited Basic" is. Now, while $110 a month is almost half of what we were paying, when the cable company offered me a plan for just $55 a month I want a plan for $55 a month. Or less.

The only other option was to go "OTA" or "over the air". Sounds oddly complicated and primitive at the same time but it's very straight forward. The first thing I did was buy an antenna like this from Best Buy for about $110. Steep, yes, but it's a one time expense I figured. I assembled it and attached it to our bed room TV, changed the TV's input to "ANT" for antenna and rescanned the channels. Boom. Money. Everything worked. I got all of our local Cleveland stations and best of all, they were HD. Score.

I hit a second pothole when I hooked up all of my TV's to the antenna through the cable box on my deck. Some of the TV's worked but only got maybe half the local stations while others wouldn't work at all. A powered, coax splitter did nothing to help the signal. By the way, it's a good idea to do schematics of your house when you tackle projects like this.

Long story short, the problem was that while my TV in my bedroom, which is on the second story of my house, worked fine with that antenna, when I put the antenna down on my deck the lack of height down there made it difficult for the antenna to pick up signals. I then put the antenna back in our bedroom and ran a long coax cable out my bedroom window down to the cable box and voila, success. Note - with digital TV antennas height is key. If you have a one story house, you're going to need to find a way to get enough height. Perhaps an antenna like this is in store for you.

Finally, to make this deal even sweeter, I made this TV antenna for just $6 so I can return the $100 store bought antenna. Yes, those are coat hangers. I know, crazy but it works better than the store bought antenna. Kid you not. Total cost of the project that included 125 feet of coax cable and a digital converter for an older set we use that does not have a digital tuner - around $75. And that's a one time expense. Sure beats almost $2,500 a year for cable.