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Does ditching your cable or satellite TV provider seem like an impossible task? It doesn’t have to be that way. There are just a few steps you need to take in preparation for that satisfying call to cancel service.

1. Determine Your Actual Cable/Satellite TV Cost

When I decided to ditch satellite TV, it was easy to determine the cost savings, my satellite bill was completely separated from other bills. My TV cost was equal to the total on my monthly billing statement. If you are like I was, then determining your TV cost is easy.

However, many people have bundled services with their provider for TV, Internet, and even telephone. The first step is to try to determine the monthly cost without the TV part of the bundle.

For example, you might currently pay $150 per month for TV, Internet, and phone. If the cost without TV drops to $85 per month, then your TV cost is $65 each month.

TV providers often make it difficult to determine exactly what the cost would be without TV. Even calling your provider might not get you an accurate price because they want to keep you as a TV subscriber. Just do the best you can to figure out how much you will pay after you cancel your TV service.

If the amount you would save is large enough to offset the cost of subscribing to one or more streaming services, then you should move to the next step. Keep in mind that there’s no need to subscribe to anything. You could just buy and/or rent all the shows and movies you want to watch.

2. Make A List of the TV Shows You Watch

The next step is to make a list of all the TV shows you and your family watch along with the network or channel where it is shown.

Your list might look like this:

• Walking Dead – AMC
• Game of Thrones – HBO
• NCIS – CBS
• Bones – FOX
• The Blacklist – NBC
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – ABC

We are going to take this list and try to find where you can watch it in a home without cable or satellite TV. When I cut the cord, I added notes to each line of this list that identified where we would be able to watch each of our shows.

Many shows have previous seasons available on one or more of the big streaming services: Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. One option is to wait and watch when the shows become available there.

A subscription to Hulu will allow you to watch the current season of many TV shows. The CBS network has their own service called CBS All Access. For any of your favorite shows on CBS, you will need to subscribe to CBS All Access for streaming access. A third option is to install a TV antenna and receive signals from your local broadcast stations directly to your TV. The setup of an antenna can be a little complex, and will be covered in a future post.

If being up to date on new episodes is important, then the best option is some combination of streaming from Hulu or CBS All Access, and buying digital season passes through Amazon, iTunes, or Google Play.

Generally speaking, the current season of shows on ABC, NBC, FOX, and the CW networks can be found on Hulu. Depending on the show it could be the entire season or just the last five episodes. A Hulu subscription can cover a big part of your entertainment. Be aware, not all shows on those networks have their current season available. You should definitely verify the shows available on Hulu as part of making your decision.

For the current season of CBS Shows, you can use CBS All Access. It is a separate subscription, but likely essential for those that want CBS shows.

There is also the option to outright purchase the current season of a TV series through Amazon, iTunes, or Google Play. In addition, the current season for some shows, like The Walking Dead, are only available for purchase through Amazon, iTunes, or Google Play for anyone without a cable or satellite subscription.

There is always an option to quit watching any shows that are not important. In the example above, I decided that watching NCIS isn’t important, and no other shows on my list are on CBS All Access, so I decided to not watch NCIS (except maybe via an antenna) and not subscribe to CBS All Access.

Keep in mind that any apps you may currently use to access cable or broadcast network shows probably will not work if you’re not an active customer of a cable or satellite provider.

After you’ve determined the source for your shows in your home without cable or satellite TV, You’re ready for the next step.

3. Calculate the Subscription Cost

Each service has a cost. I decided that adding too many subscriptions would cause the cost to approach the cost of regular satellite television. That defeated one of my primary reasons for cutting the cord.

The good news is that these streaming services generally don’t require a long term commitment. It is possible to subscribe to a service for less than a whole year and still save money. Using the example from the previous step, I might have added the following notes to my list:

• Walking Dead – AMC – Buy from iTunes $42.99/year
• Game of Thrones – HBO – HBO Now $14.99/month
• NCIS – CBS – Quit watching or use an antenna
• Bones – FOX – Hulu Plus $11.99/month
• The Blacklist – NBC – Hulu Plus
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – ABC – Netflix $9.99/month

For easy comparison, I calculate the Walking Dead monthly cost to be about $3.60/month. If I add Hulu, Netflix, and HBO Now, then the total is $40.57/month.

But wait! Game of Thrones is only on for 3 months. I can save by only subscribing to HBO Now during that time. Three months times $14.99 is $44.97, a monthly cost of $3.75 over 12 months.

Making this change saves more than $10/month and gives a new monthly cost of $29.33. If you remember the example from the first step, the cost for TV alone was $65. Switching to streaming saves over $35/month and $428 every year. That’s a nice bit of extra money in your pocket. However, this is only an example. You should go through the same calculations for your own service and shows.

4. Get Ready to Cut the Cord

I suggest purchasing a dedicated streaming box like an Apple TV, Amazon FireTV, or Roku. There are several small plug in devices like the Chromecast, FireTV Stick, and Roku Stick that are good and work fine. In the long term, you will probably prefer the speed of a dedicated box instead of a stick type device.

If you can’t afford a dedicated box, then use what you can afford. One of the aforementioned sticks would be my second choice. Finally, many smart TVs, Blu-Ray players, and game consoles have apps available that have apps available to access Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services.

Whatever device you choose, you then set up your subscription and test it out. Once you know it’s working, you are ready for the final step…

5. Cancel Your Cable or Satellite Service

When the time comes to make the call, be aware that they may try to keep you as a customer. They might offer you a really great deal to keep your current package.

I can’t tell you what to do, but be prepared for their offers. When I made my call to cancel, I was already certain that I was going to cancel and was not going to change that plan. So make the call, cancel your TV package, and celebrate joining the growing number of cord cutters.

What This Guide Doesn’t Cover

1. Using a TV antenna to receive local stations over the air – This is a great option because it’s free once you buy and install the antenna. However, selecting, buying, and installing an antenna can be a complex task. There is simply too much to discuss with antennas. I may cover this in a future post.
2. Which streaming services have which shows – This is where you have to do some homework. Each of the streaming services have different agreements to make shows available. Your homework is to investigate which of your favorite shows are available.
3. Which streaming box to buy – All the streaming boxes work well. Most people are happy with either an AppleTV, Amazon FireTV, or a Roku box. There are others available. I suggest reading reviews and talking to friends. Finally, make sure the box select has the apps for the streaming providers you want to use. We have Apple devices at home, so adding an AppleTV was the obvious choice for my family. We still have a FireTV Stick on a different TV.

That Wasn’t So Bad

I hope you find cutting the cord as easy as we did. We cancelled satellite TV three months ago and don’t miss it. If you cut the cord and find you miss your old cable or satellite provider, I’m sure they will take you back. We have already received some nice offers from DirecTV to go back. In fact, the offers are much better than anything they offered me to stay.

Good luck with your cord cutting experience!

We took a long and winding road to cutting the cord. I was a child growing up in the 1980s when my parents first subscribed to cable TV. I remember the excitement of moving from a few local broadcast channels to a whopping 60 channels. We watched kid oriented shows, old TV shows from the 1950s and 1960s, music videos on MTV, sports on ESPN, and even full length movies, completely uninterrupted on HBO. I was a kid, so I didn’t really know how much it cost. Cable TV was, to use an 80s term, totally rad!

About fifteen years later, I moved into an apartment. It was completely natural to subscribe to cable TV. It was how almost everyone I knew watched TV shows and sports. I was paying the bills now, but the cost was low enough that it wasn’t really an issue.

Satellite Television

Shortly after getting married and buying our first home, we switched from our unreliable cable company to satellite television, specifically DirecTV. We received more channels, more reliable service, and a clearer, crisper picture than cable. Watching TV was exciting again.

It was 2001, and TV was still mostly a scheduled event. You either sat down when the show was on, or you recorded it on a VHS tape to watch it later. Setting the VCR to record a show was both inconvenient and unreliable. When something went wrong, the VCR wouldn’t record what you wanted, and you would never be able to watch your show.

Tivo To The Rescue

A DirecTV Tivo receiver was our next step. It brought all the ease of use and reliability of the established Tivo service to DirecTV. All the excitement of television was back once again! As long as we set the show to record (a few presses on the remote control buttons), we could watch shows when we were ready.

DirecTV eventually moved away from Tivo to their own DVR software, but the experience remained good. We almost never had problems that resulted in missed shows, and setting a TV show or series to record was easy. My kids have been fortunate growing up in a home where the shows they wanted to see were likely already saved on the DVR, so they could watch nearly anything on demand.

Cost Increases and Value

A few years ago, I noticed that I could page through the entire channel guide and find nothing that I wanted to watch. If I didn’t already have something saved on the DVR to watch, I could either watch something I didn’t care about, or get up and do something else. I usually chose the latter.

At the same time, the cost of satellite TV and cable TV was regularly increasing. I cut programming and received discounts to compensate, but additional price increases offset the cuts and discounts. Around October of 2014, the combination of decreasing entertainment value and increasing costs started us on a path to cutting the cord.

Amazon Prime

We already subscribed to Amazon Prime for the shipping benefits, so using Amazon Prime Video (which is included in the Amazon Prime cost) to test the viability of streaming TV in our household was an obvious first step. When Amazon made their FireTV Stick available for just $20 in November of 2014, we jumped on the offer.

It turned out that the entire family enjoyed watching shows on the FireTV Stick. We received entertainment on demand without any worry about setting a VCR or DVR. During this time we only watched shows that were available free for Amazon Prime subscribers. A few months later we started the next phase of the streaming experiment…

Enter Netflix

I was familiar with Netflix for years, and I’ll admit that our family was extremely late to the Netflix service. Once we started with Netflix, there was no going back. In just a couple months, watching a show for my kids meant watching Netflix, sometimes Amazon Prime, and definitely not DirecTV. As our kids spent less and less time watching DirecTV, my wife and I determined that they wouldn’t even miss it if we cancelled the service. Our plan was to transition to exclusively using streaming services and DVD/Blu-Ray as our television entertainment sources. It was finally time to cut the cord.

Cutting the Cord

In March of 2016, we cancelled DirecTV, took the hit of a $100 early termination fee (which was better than paying $120+ per month for another six months of service we weren’t really using), and transitioned to streaming services. We added Hulu to catch a few of our favorite broadcast shows and gain additional options. Overall, we are saving nearly $90 per month (over $1,000 per year) and haven’t missed satellite TV at all. There’s no contract with any of the streaming services, so we can turn them off for a few months if we want or need to for financial reasons.

There are many ways to receive streaming content into your home. None of these require long term contracts, so you can simply subscribe to the services that provide the shows you want to watch.

• Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, CBS All Access, and HBO Now – The biggest providers of streaming services in the United States. They offer a combination of network/cable TV shows, movies, and original shows exclusive to each service. Each charges a monthly fee.
• Sling TV and Sony Vue – Two services that offer live streaming of cable and broadcast networks for a monthly fee. This is basically the same as cable or satellite, except that it arrives through your internet connection. AT&T DirecTV is expected to offer a similar service soon.
• iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play – The three major sources for purchase or rental of digital movies and TV shows. If you can’t get it on Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime, then maybe you can buy or rent a digital copy.
• Redbox and Retail Stores – Renting a DVD or Blu-Ray from Redbox or buying from a retail store is still an option if you have a player connected to your TV.

Cutting the cord means changing how you think about TV. In the past, TV was about watching a show at a specific time on a specific channel. By cutting the cord, you flip that around. You watch what you want, when you’re ready to watch it. In my opinion, you must have this mindset. I consider our cord cutting experience to be a complete success.