TV time

About a year ago, we cancelled our subscription to satellite service. We found it was much too expensive for us, because we would often use pay-per-view for movies instead of renting from the neighbourhood store that was a dollar cheaper, but would require we get off our butts and go rent a movie. As with most things, if you just have to click, you will spend much much more money than you otherwise would. (think online shopping!).

Sure we went through a bit of withdrawal. We used our PVR extensively. When we finally had an opportunity to sit down and watch tv, about 9:00 p.m. most evenings, we enjoyed having our favorite shows on demand, instead of building our schedules around tv.

Shortly after cancelling the subscription, we stumbled upon our favorite show's websites. Most of those sites allow you to watch full episodes online for free. Yes, you do have pay for more internet usage. But it still works out much much much cheaper. The very ironic thing is, we had a few channels we really wanted but refused to sign up for as they were premium channels and our monthly bill would have sky-rocketed. We quickly found out after cancelling our subscription that most of the shows we love are also available for free online on those sites. I won't give them away, but if you like home design, cooking, and new discoveries you can guess.

Also CBC and other similar sites have many shows that we like and we can watch the next day.

So - we don't get first dibs on the shows, and maybe they are a bit older, but we are watching even more television than we ever did before.. and we are loving it. We also subscribe to Netflix.. for about $9 a month our kids have access to all the tv they could ever want. And we often find movies we would like to watch too, and tv episodes.

We have taken our monthly bill from over $75 a month to less than $10 - I do have to figure out the extra internet usage but since we also go with a discount service for that, I know it's not much. Not only are we saving a lot of cash, we are also enjoying our tv experience much much more! And we are totally not slaves to tv-land scheduling!