Do You Need Cable TV?

I was a member of Netflix when I first started hearing about instant streaming. It would soon be taking over the world, experts said. Even as early as four or five years ago, TV networks were beginning to stream their TV shows on the web. Miss the latest episode of Survivor? That's okay, just go to CBS.com and watch it. And, in fact, for a while that was the only time I watched TV on my laptop -- when I'd missed an episode of something.

Even with a laptop, though, I could never imagine watching TV exclusively that way. TV-watching is a room-filling experience. If you live alone, you want that noise to fill the house. It makes you feel less lonely. If you live with others, you want to sit on the sofa and watch TV together, not crowd around a computer monitor to watch it.

But with the advent of big-screen computer monitors...

...that's all changing. You could easily hook a desktop up to one of these huge monitors and watch TV as a family. Or you can buy one of the many devices that now allow you to stream directly to your TV.

I don't know about you, but we're paying more than $130 for a cable TV and Internet access...$130 is way too much. Granted, a great portion of that is for the fastest Internet, which you have to have to stream movies and TV shows over the Internet. But imagine if you could live without paying that huge cable TV bill every month... Even if you cut down to the most basic cable you can get, you could save quite a bit of money.

Netflix's Instant Streaming plan is $7.99 a month. You'll have access to a ridiculous number of movies and TV shows, but be forewarned. If you're looking for brand new movies, you probably won't find them here. Netflix's Instant Streaming plan is more for people who like older movies. Even movies made as recently the 80s and 90s...Netflix has those in droves. TV series from those decades fill the Instant Streaming site as well. As for the newer movies, they appear to come from Starz, so whatever's showing on that network is on Netflix. (Currently: The Last Airbender and Secretariat appear to be the newest movies.)

If you want to stream the latest TV shows to your TV or computer, Hulu will probably be your place. You can already watch the last few episodes of TV shows for free...as well as numerous other TV shows, including classics. But to get full seasons of shows you really like, you probably will have to upgrade to Hulu Plus. Also, you can't stream free Hulu but you can stream Hulu Plus to your TV set. (Or even your smartphone, if you want to watch TV that way.) Hulu Plus is $7.99 a month.

I'm paying $79.99 a month for Comcast cable. If I cut it down to basic, it would be less than $20 (or so my co-worker says -- I can't figure out their website enough to find out how much it would actually be). That would give me local news which, as far as I can tell is NOT currently available for streaming. (Guys, there's a good business idea...) Add Hulu Plus and Netflix Instant Streaming to that and it's a total of $35.98 a month. I think we used to pay that for cable back in college.

The only problem I can see is that if you're living with a "flipper," someone who constantly switches channels and seems to get joy out of that, you might have a problem. The overabundance of choices on Netflix and Hulu Plus can sometimes be VERRRRY overwhelming. You're looking at all these movies and TV shows and the more you look, the less sure you are of what you want to watch. It shows you how TV has always narrowed our choices.

It's the same with cable TV. Watching TV was a lot easier when we had only a handful of channels to choose from!