In an effort to lower our monthly expenses, we decided to jettison cable. Paying $60 a month for 1,203 channels we don’t watch was, in my mind, a complete waste of money. The Mrs. likes to watch a few shows, like Chopped, Grey’s Anatomy, and American Idiot Idol, but paying $720 a year for it was a bit of over kill.
Now we have a set of rabbit ears so she can pick up American Idol over the air - pure digital too, so the picture is just as clear (if not clearer) than when watching it over Fios – and bought a $79 Roku box and an $8 a month Hulu Plus account for everything else. My children didn’t think it odd that you can just dial up any show you’d like that’s online and watch it right away. But for someone who grew up having to hold the rabbit ears so my dad could watch a grainy, b&w wrestlin’ show, it’s amazing.
And the Roku box is tiny. The box is so small, it can’t hid the ugly wires behind it.
That little, itty bitty box replaced the DVR. Why store the show locally when I can just request it in real time? And the picture quality so far has been phenomenal. We also have an Amazon Prime & Netflix account, so there are plenty of movies to watch, many of which are in Blu-ray definition. Eventually, most TV’s will have this capability built right in and my grandkids will wonder why we had to have an extra box on the side of a screen that could only show two dimensional images.
Technology moves on.