Alternative home entertainment

A friend of mine, who may very well be a member here, has announced his intention to ditch his cable service, subscribe to Amazon Prime and Netflix and get a digital antenna for local TV channels.

I'm assuming this discussion has been had on here, but I'm failing to find it. If someone wants to post a link to it, that'd be awesome.

Failing that, I find the idea intriguing and I'd like some input as to whether this approach actually saves money.

For me, this is what the finances would look like:

$50 a month for internet ($600 a year)
$79 a year for Prime
$96 a year for Netflix

I haven't checked to see what it would cost to subscribe to mlb.tv or whatever web-based package I'd need to watch college football.

So has anyone here tried anything along these lines? Did it actually result in savings, and what viewing sacrifices were necessary to achieve them?

 

RickStain does something like this.

If you want to do it and still watch non-network live sports at home, be prepared to do a lot of illegal streaming.

 

MLB.tv is about $100-120 per season. If you have a Roku or Apple TV, you can watch the games on your TV, except or the local team(s). For college football, you'll probably have to go with pirate streams as Watch ESPN limited access to TV subscribers for games that are on the ESPN channels.

You really don't need both Prime and Netflix. Drop one and pick up Hulu Plus or a lot of this season's shows.

 

If you drink cheap beer and tip badly, Buffalo Wild Wings can be cheaper than cable.

 

Nice.

 

I thought (hoped?) this would be about escort services.

 

Can't comment, I'm busy trying to watch the entire run of West Wing via Netflix on my son's Kindle.

 

That would have been way more fun.

 

On a serious note, I spend $95 on cable (Showtime is my only premium channel) and $40 on phone/internet. I supplement the rest with Redbox or pay-per-view movies (about $2 each).

 

I dropped cable a long time ago. I come out about even money-wise since I get both streaming and mail Netflix along with the MLB, NBA packages and have to buy entire seasons on ITunes of shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men. But I feel like I have better entertainment options. Rooting for the NFL team in my media market helps keep my plan economically feasible. Otherwise, I'd spend more on the bar tab than I was saving dropping cable.

And it's amazing how much content one can watch when commercials are taken out of the equation. People at work think I watch eight hours of TV and movies a day. I watch about two hours. Zip through a replay of the most important innings of a baseball game, watch a 20-minute episode of a sitcom, watch a movie or 40-minute TV drama. In our line of work where we go 60 hours a week and work such wacky hours, I value being able to compact five or six hours of entertainment into two hours a day.

 

Or you could do what one of our neighbors does to us, steal your somebody else's intrawebs. :

We really don't have any premium channels on our cable service, just the digital package for HD. All we add is DVR and I still can't believe how much we pay. My bill has gone literally more than quadrupled in the past 15 years.

 

It's about $100 for a decent over air antenna and some ability with a drill to put it up.

You are also giving up a DVR by doing this, right?

I think I would be paying an extra $100 a month to have TV the way I currently have it.