Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Archive for February 18th, 2008

In Ontario we are celebrating the strangely observed Family Day. Strangely celebrated since most folks have the day off, except Federal Government Employees and some companies, so we do have mail delivery, but the Loblaws is closed? Going to make for an interesting day of figuring out whether I want to skate around the neighbourhood (yet another Freezing Rain storm in Ottawa) or sit at home with my Family and do Family things like:

• Paint the Family room (no, not likely to happen, Home Depot is closed too)
• Work on our Genealogy (I got a program for Christmas to work on that, so I may actually do that one)
• Ask my Children how their lives are going. That one is easy and it takes 3 minutes, because the answer is “Fine!” (with a very annoyed tone).

Enjoy Family Day, get into it.

How Much Do You Pay For Cable (revisited)

From time to time I talk about how much home entertainment costs. I view my home as not very extravagant in this area (I haven’t upgraded my stereo in years, and we still have standard definition TV’s for now). We do have “Digital Cable” but that ended up costing $1.50 more a month (for this year at least), that is our only major step so far. We also have High Speed Internet access, but I view that as a necessity now (for my work, and for life in general).

More and more I talk to my co-workers and they have extravagant home theater and entertainment systems and are spending a big chunk of money on subscription fees or buying media for these systems (i.e. Cable TV monthly charges and DVD (High Definition) purchases).

There is a very small group of folks who have gone completely in the other direction, and have turned OFF their Cable TV access (they still have high speed Internet access).

Their reasoning is actually quite good:

1. They are rarely at home and thus will rarely sit down in front of a TV to watch a show at a specific time, so most of the shows they watch are “recorded”. Some have actual antennas (not the old rabbit ears, better than that) and they can get some digital broadcast TV over the air for Free.
2. When they do have time to watch “TV” they actually watch a fair amount on their PC (DVDs sometimes or recorded shows), either where they are (traveling) or their PC’s connect into their home entertainment HDTVs.
3. They are cheap and don’t want to pay Comcast or Rogers Cable $80 a month for the privilege to watch TV, or fork out $25-$30 for High Def DVDs.

So what do they do? They simply find content on the Internet. Most shows are now available in their entirety from their original broadcasters. Those that aren’t are available from Bittorrent sites where you can download content (illegal in the U.S., might be illegal in Canada, not sure of the copyright laws).

So they save about $1000 a year and get to watch what they want, when they want? Sounds like a good idea to me.