How to save money on cable TV: cancel it

Another tech post today, because in two weeks, I’m taking what I once would have considered to me a drastic step: I’m cancelling cable TV.

Today, though, it’s an easy decision. Because for the price of one month’s charges (currently about $60, which includes premium channels like BBC America), we can watch pretty much anything we want for a whole year.

Here’s how:

Step one: Buy a cable (a literal cable, that is), which will connect up your laptop to your TV. Monoprice (recommended by a nice man in the Apple store) sells loads of these. If you don’t know which one you need, use their brilliant customer service live chat to get their very good advice. We’ve got an HD TV and I’m typing this on a MacBook, so I bought a mini displayport adaptor and an HDMI cable. The sound didn’t come through initially, but once the I’d enabled USB output in the System Preferences panel, it worked a treat.

Step two: Get a Netflix account. Oh wait, you’ve already got one. The particularly relevant bit here is that now you have your snazzy cables, you can watch the instant watch films and TV shows on your TV – in very decent quality, by non-AV geek standards anyway.

Step three: Fall in love with Hulu, the genius television streaming aggregator site that lets you watch pretty much anything that’s been on TV in the last week, and often much longer. Very sadly, last week Hulu reportedly gave up on their plans to launch in the UK, after talks fell through with a couple of the bigger networks. But hey, at least you have BBC iPlayer – I’m not any way near geeky enough to be able to use proxy servers to make it work from here, so don’t complain too much.

The pros? You’ll save a lot of money. And you’ll also see a lot less advertising – Hulu only puts one ad in each ad break, thereby lessening my boyfriend’s out-of-control ad rage. You also don’t have to watch things when they’re on – I have no idea when most of my favourite shows broadcast. Is it even worth mentioning that this is all legal, too?

The cons? Rolling news is near impossible to find, but you’ll find streaming broadcasts on the likes of Britain’s Channel 4, and quite frankly, I’ve still never come to terms with US TV news’s often patronising, partisan, overly excited style. The other problem I haven’t yet solved: how to save stuff for later, as you could with Sky+ or Tivo, or for that matter, how to set up some kind of series link style reminder, which would tell me when things are about to be deleted. Any ideas, people?

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