I've missed you all. But life got in the way. I did a medical procedure...it didn't work...but there is always next time. Just means more opportunities to find ways to save money.
So I've done a lot of talking about saving money on groceries in Toronto, let me now venture into another area...media.
Up until recently we were paying well over $200 a month for cable and internet. INSANE. We had all the fancy channels, the movie networks....we were doing a lot of downloading on our computers (yay itunes) etc etc....
We'd done a lot of complaining about the costs and how it's too much, but we never did anything about it until recently.
A month back we switched our internet to Tekksavvy which allowed us more speed, less clogging of our computers and smoother game play all at the same time. The price was a real savings (we were spending aournd $100 before, now we are about $50) as well. It also uses our Rogers line so we only had to switch our modem. YAY!
We also got rid of all the movie networks, HBO and the like which was $20+ a month and switched to Netflicks. Netflicks is like $8 a month and can work through your xbox, ps3 or you can purchase a system that will allow you to use it. Currently the selection isn't all that and a bag of apples, but that is due to licensing issues with Rogers not wanting to give them up. But we hope soon they will offer more selection, even still there is a lot of different flicks. OMG the BBC selection, wicked.
For our everyday TV viewing we have stuck with our regular package, but are considering on switching to using bunny ears. Only now you can put a dish on your roof to transmit the signal. If you don't know already, the closer you live to the CN Tower the more channels, and quailty of channels, you will recieve and for free! How can you beat that! Now this is mostly for casual watchers. But that's why you have your tekksavvy internet....lots of channels are starting to put full shows available on their website. So go view them there...might be a day after airing, but who cares!
So there you have it, some simple and easy ways to save more money at home! Enjoy!
Sadly, I subscribed to Netflix the moment they came out and the library, while it's expanded, has expanded VERY slowly. I've been at the sort of, "I've seen everything they have to offer that I'm interested in," point for quite some time, and they add new things to watch only rarely.
ReplyDeleteI did the math a little while ago and it actually makes a lot of sense to go pay-per-show for many people. For example, suppose you buy your shows from iTunes at 99 cents an episode, but you're paying say $60 a month for cable. You'd have to watch two episodes of TV shows *every single day* for the month to break even paying per show. It feels weird to pay per show, but still. My wife and I mostly watch an episode of TV over dinner, maybe three times a week. So if you figure that that's 12 episodes a month, plus a couple on the weekends, so say 20 episodes a month. If we pay 99 cents an episode, that works out to $19.80 for the month. And we'd probably actually watch less if we had to pay.
(Of course, if you're not concerned about legality, you can just torrent your television.)
I actually know a lot of people who have cut the cord and just don't have cable at all now. The only roadblock I've run into with that idea is that my wife watches hockey, and I don't know of any alternate means for following live sports offhand.