Saturday, March 14, 2009

Do you still need cable? Maybe not.

Hello fellow cable lovers. If you're anything like us, you're tuned in to the TV almost every night of the week. You might even be so bad that you have two shows recording on the DVR, so you have to watch a third show on a different TV (guilty as charged, but in our defense, on the rare chance this happens, we're watching different shows). As much as we love TV, every time we get the cable bill we think, "Why do we pay so much for this?"

Thanks to a few new sites on the internet, cable may be becoming a thing of the past. One of those websites has a pretty funny name. Hulu.com is a website where you can watch your favorite TV shows and movies for free. Yes, absolutely free. The site is also completely legal, and NBC is actually one of the site's co-owners.

Our initial assumption was that this was just a place to watch old re-runs of Seinfeld and Friends, but we were quickly proven wrong. Hulu hosts hits from NBC, Fox, Universal, Warner Brothers, MGM, Sony Picture Television, and more.

We had been considering buying or renting DVDs of Arrested Development, as it came highly recommended by many friends. Instead, we Googled, "Watch Arrested Development Online" and were pleasantly surprised to find the entire series available for free on Hulu. Another time, our DVR stopped working, but new episodes of Chuck were right there on Hulu so we could quickly catch up in time for next week's episode.

So, how does this thing generate a profit? Short, 30 seconds commercials placed throughout the videos. And though you can't skip through the commercials, they're much shorter than the ones you would see if you were watching on live TV.

In addition to Hulu, most TV networks host episodes online the day after they air. You can watch them by visiting their website. However, the streaming isn't quite as seamless as Hulu, and you may have to wait while the video buffers, which can be annoying.

For you sports lovers, cutting the cable may not be an option yet (unless you can deal with listening to everything on the radio).

If we cancelled our cable and relied on Hulu and other sources, we would save about $60-$70 a month (more than $700 a year). Keep in mind that with the digital transition coming, you can get many local channels with a digital converter box. Digital converter boxes cost anywhere from $50 to $100. To offset the cost, each household is eligible for two coupons valued at $40 apiece to purchase digital converer boxes. For more information on the digital transition, visit http://www.dtv.gov/.

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