Consumers In Canada Are Getting Rid Of Cable TV

It's clear from watching the news and reading the newspapers. In Canada consumers have given up cable for Internet TV and old fashion antenna. The advance in Internet video has made almost any show you might want to watch available online. If you don't want to bother with online video then new HD televisions are capable of getting high definition video with a standard antenna. No more fuzzy picture TV in HD through antenna comes in crystal clear. What these all means to the cable companies is that consumers are getting the choice they wanted and best of all for free. If only cable companies had created a system to subscribe only to the channels that a consumer wanted and not the bundled them packs that have channel you will never watch. It was just a matter of listneing to consumers and give them what they wanted. Instead cable companies just focused on take as much money as they wanted. Those days are now gone and more and more people will seek free TV viewing be it online or through HD antenna's. It's not that hard to give up cable. It's been almost a year for me and I have more choice then ever.

DVD Video Media Jukebox

If you have a large collection of DVD’s then creating a video media jukebox can help protect your collection and free storage space. Looking at a stack of DVD’s on the shelf is not pretty the more you have the more space you need to store them. If you want to free some space in your TV viewing room why not rip and store DVD’s on an external drive. The drive can then be connected to your TV’s HDMI connection. There are a few low cost video media players that you can buy for around $100 plus the cost of the hard drive. Getting files to the media player can be a little grey as far as copyright laws are concerned. If you bought the DVD’s and back them up to a drive then you are backing up a movie that you already paid for and have a physical copy. You are using this back up for your own use and not sharing the file. This is covered under fair use for your copyrighted discs. If you download movies from a bit torrent site or other file sharing networks then you are breaking the law and can face legal challenges for those movie files. The best use of a media jukebox is for use of movie that your own legally. You can store all the movie files on the external drive and put the DVD’s away and never touch them again. When you back up DVD’s you need software to rip the disc to the external drive. There are many programs that you can find online that will work well for this task.

Once you have a collection on the external drive you use the media player to search and play the content. The top media players all have an easy to use interface and remote control. Getting the media to play on your TV should take little effort. Now you never have to worry about scratched discs.

Xbox 360 TV Shows

The Canadian version of the Xbox 360 has a good number of TV shows and movies for download or rent. If you want to own TV shows the video marketplace for Xbox has many top shows. It costs about $2.00 Canadian to buy an episode. The Torchwood BBC 5 episod series cost about $10.00 and provided 5 hours of entertainment. There are are many free sites that you can watch TV shows, but the quality and audio on the Xbox makes it a perfect media player. It's true that you will have to pay to use the video market place, but if you cut your cable bill then you are able to set aside a budget for paid downloads. The ability of getting high quality content through the Xbox 360 along with the free shows online adds many more hours of TV viewing that I am not paying a cable company for. Even though I set a low budget of $20.00 for my downloads I have yet to spend that much in a month. What I do is buy shows when I am unable to find other programs with my TV antenna and I can not be bothered to find online content. The Xbox 360 video marketplace is just one more choice to find high quality TV programing. If you have not tried the Xbox 360 video marketplace there are many free trailers that you can watch and get a feel for the technology.

I Love buying TV Shows Online

With out cable it's true that some shows I just can't catch through an antenna. The HBO shows and some other networks only offer paid downloads. You can find many of these shows on iTunes or Xbox. The cost is not that high compared with having a cable bill. What I have been doing to keep the cost in budget is limited how much I buy online. When I paid for cable the cost was about $80 to $100 a month. With that amount in mind I figure I could set aside about $30 a month to download movies and TV shows. Which is still a savings compared with paying for cable, plus I can watch these shows any time I want.

The way I watched TV has changed living without cable. The amount I spend in front of the tube is about 4 hours a day. I can get many free shows with just my TV antenna and there is enough programing to keep me watching most nights. When there is nothing on TV that I want to watch I might search for a show online on the free sites like HULU or other similar services. If I can not find anything to watch for free then I buy or rent through iTunes or the Xbox.

This method has worked well and soon it will be a year that I went cable free. The amount of shows I have access with the Internet makes cable seem like a thing of the past.

Anyone thinking of giving up cable TV must look through online video sites to get an understanding of the programing available for free.

It's nice to know at the end of the month that I am saving $100 and do not have to worry about one more bill.

There are other services that you can save money by finding free or lower cost service providers. The telephone service can also be replaced with lower cost options. It's not about being cheap, but being smart with your money. If you are paying for services try to figure out if you really need to have the service and look for alternatives. It might seem like a few extra dollars a month, but over time all those extra services add up into the thousands.