Cutting the Cable Cord

DirecTV

One of the things we’ve realized is that, as a family, we spend waaaay too much time in front of screens. TV screens, computer screens, iPads, iPhones and Nintendos. I always thought we were in pretty decent shape in this arena given that our entire household has one 7 year old flat panel television and one really old box television that we hooked up to the Wii. But all of these electronics are getting in the way of quality family time.

So, Adios DirecTV.

TV is like crack for the kids. So, we’re stepping them down. For now we’ve got Netflix and Hulu Plus. There was surprisingly little whining about the departure of the DVR. A couple of days of aggravation and they adjusted to the new set up. Plus, we’re saving quite a bit of money of this unnecessary luxury. We went from nearly $80/month to about $17/month.

What they don’t know, though, is that we’ve got an evil, sadistic plan to limit their daily screen consumption even more than it already is during the school year. Bwahahahahaha.

I expect a lot of pushback when we issue the edict. What will be really hard, though, is when we apply the same limits to ourselves.

Facebook, anyone? I wonder if I’ll get the shakes the first few days…


9 Responses to Cutting the Cable Cord

  1. We too have been without cable for almost 8 years now. We get the basic channels which is more than enough and have just added in Netflix last Christmas and I love our limited TV options. We do struggle with the video games as the kids always want to play so during the school year we have game hour on school nights from 8-9. If they haven’t finished there homework or have missing assignments they do not get to play. We used to just let them play an hour but it got hard to track who had played and who hadn’t (we have 4 kids) so the set time works best for us. We do keep their itouches, game controllers and Gameboys in our bedroom as we have one who would get up and play all night and we password the computers. Its hard to feel like the video game police but I feel it is so important to limit there screen time when possible.

  2. We cut the cable down to basic stations and especially since we realize we were only watching network channels most of the time. Less the cost and increase on family time equals priceless. And, to comment on your teaser about Facebook – we are a month Facebook free, amazing! Our kids are not involved in social media yet, but we are setting some new technology standards in the house from the get-go. Love to read your blog it is so much in line with all that we have done and are doing.

  3. When my boyfriend and I moved in together over 5 years ago we decided not to get cable, just to see how it would go. Between Hulu & Netflix, we really don’t miss much; at worse we’re a season behind on shows (but we actually bought the final season of Breaking Bad through Amazon since we couldn’t risk spoilers!). The hardest part has been sports, especially basketball. There’s plenty of football on network tv, but it’s hard to get a basketball game, especially since our team isn’t local.

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