Roku + NetFlix + RedBox = TV heaven?
Roku + NetFlix + RedBox = TV Utopia.
We recently went cold turkey and cancelled our satellite service. The price was getting close to gouging range and we were increasingly finding that we were just paying for a lot of crap. We recently redeemed our $40 government coupons for our Digital TV Converter Boxes and discovered there’s a 24 hour TPT Kids station. So that was the final straw…we no longer needed to pay DirecTV to babysit and instead of paying DirecTV, we can toss a few more bucks TPT’s way.
So, we’re going to see if we can get by on OTA TV and NetFlix.
NetFlix is great, but we tend to forget to watch what came in and it sits there for weeks. The online video selection is OK, but we’re stuck with the laptop for that.
RedBox is great, but we tend to forget to return the movie we get, so that $1 soon creeps up to $4-$5.
It seems like there’s potential there for a great partnership or outrright merger. Add the $100 Roku box for your TV and it seems like NetFlix could easily corner the market…RedBox instead of Blockbuster, Roku instead of iTunes, and NetFlix instead of cable/satellite. Hmmm…
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My household recently made a similar switch off the “crap grid” that is satellite and cable premium subscriptions.
We now have basic, basic cable (about 20 stations including all the TPT digital and local HD channels), AppleTV for just the “premium” cable content that we actually want (purchased on an episodic or seasonal basis–no commercials too!), and finally a low-end netflix subscription to cover the few things that aren’t available on AppleTV (I’m looking at you NBC/Universal).
Our results are that we’re spending considerably less per month (averaging less than 50%) than we were paying for our previous cable package even after the AppleTV/netflix charges. And, the funny thing is, we’re actually watching more content than we were before.
The sweetest part of the deal is that if you have comcast internet as well, they basically pay you $2/month to take basic cable TV too (including all the over-the-air broadcast HD channels) via a monthly refund that is actually more than basic cable costs. W00t!
We did the same thing (except we canceled cable service). We use a digital converter box to receive broadcast channels with perfect quality.
We use a combination of Hulu.com, Netflix and Itunes to watch our favorite cable shows and just bought a Roku to watch Netflix instant shows and movies.
Since we spend a lot of time searching different web sites and services for shows, my husband (a cgi programmer) just wrote a web based tool which does it for us.
We are blogging about our experiences with digital broadcast tv and have just posted the ‘showfinder tool‘ on our blog at CancelCable.com.