Cutting the Cord — How I save $20+ a month with Comcast
Everyone is cutting the cord lately, and companies are making it extremely easy to do. YouTube, Hulu, and other companies are offering solutions for people to ditch the older cable providers and still watch and record live television. Consequently though, cable companies make it so that bundling cable with internet is a better deal rather then just standalone internet.
Over the past year or so, I’ve taken a serious step in completely digitizing my movie collection. We use Plex as our medium of choice to watch movies, and Plex makes it super easy to share libraries with family members at no cost.
Plex also offers a DVR feature, which, although in beta, works pretty well, and will only get better with time. To make it work, additional hardware is required, but over time will save hundreds with cable companies.
As an example, our current cable and ISP is Comcast. We currently pay just about $100 exactly for cable and internet (250 Mbps). But instead of using Comcast’s cable/DVR box, we purchased and HDHomerun. This saves us $10/month in equipment rental fees. (I also own my own modem and router, saving another $10 in equipment rental cost.) Comcast also plays nice with these devices, supplying a free cable card to be inserted into the back of the device. They even credit your account $2.50 each month for using a cable card. I’m not sure why, but I can’t complain about free money.
Plex DVR gets program information from the HDHomerun device and provides a nice interface for you to select programs and set a schedule for recording. Once the show is recorded, you can watch it via Plex’s software. They’ll even remove the commercials for you, and that’s a huge win.
So how do we watch live TV? This is the best part. Everything we want to watch — TV, movies, DVR recordings, is all done in one place, on a single input — Apple TV.
With the 4th generation Apple TV bringing the App Store into play, developers like Plex (use for movies and DVR recordings) and Channels (use for live TV) can utilize the platform so that anything you want to do for media lives on the same device. It doesn’t get much easier.
So how does it work out financially? There is an up front cost. I think most poeple now have their own modem and router. If not, the overhead goes up a little bit. But since I already had my own modem and router, I will only show my numbers. I also won’t consider the cost of the Apple TV since I already had one of those as well.
Cable card — Free (Account credit $2.50/month)
HDHomerun Prime (Amazon) — $109
Channels app for Apple TV 4 — $20
Total upfront cost — $126.50
Plex pass to enable DVR functionality — $5/month*
*Plex also offers a lifetime Plex pass for a one-time fee of $120.
Considering these costs and the cost of renting hardware from Comcast, I recouped my upfront costs in roughly 6 months. Not bad. Should you need more hardware (router, modem, Apple TV) it will take more time, but eventually it will pay off, especially if you plan on staying with your provider for a while.
All in all, getting started can seem kind of overwhelming, but the convenience of having all my media, including live TV, available through the same TV input makes it more than worth it.
