Goodbye Expensive Premium TV Service

Over the years I among everyone else has noticed the cost of cable or satellite television services has been increasing almost on an annual basis.  For me, this is becoming a burden because of the high costs I have to pay my cable provider, Comcast, each month.  Currently I am paying almost $70/month on cable TV which includes a DVR and also HD option.  I watch pretty much all my shows on networks which broadcast over the air for free, except for a few shows that come on Comedy Central or Adult Swim.

Why should I have to pay a premium for content I only watch about 10% of?  To think that in 2010 the cable and satellite providers have still not provided a la carte options is mind numbing.  Look at the music or movie model.  Apple among others have single handedly disrupted these age old models and re-invented them.  I no longer have to spend $15 on a CD just to hear two songs I want.  I can spend $2 within iTunes.  I can rent a movie digitally and completely bypass the rental companies or even having to buy a movie I will only watch once.

So why has the cable industry not changed?

Well, I think that is next.  If what this article says is true, then Apple is about to turn the cable/satellite provides on their heads.  Since most of the major networks own all of the smaller cable channels anyway, I would have no problem paying $30/mo for access to shows from specific networks that I want to watch.  Then, I could watch it when I wanted and where I wanted.  Probably even on my iPhone as well.

But before I get to that, I wanted to mention my current initiative I am taking: I am dumping cable TV completely.

That’s right, I cancelled my TV and to even do this was a very difficult thing for me to do.  Since I was probably 12 I’ve had a TV either with or without cable but mostly having cable.  Now days I don’t watch so much cable especially since the shows are just brain drain shows based on ridiculousness.  My plan is to go completely internet based for my TV options.  This will include a little jewel of a software called Boxee.

If you didn’t know, Boxee is a software that’s been around for a while in closed beta that essentially aggregates online content together into one clean interface.  It also has app support so you can get things like Pandora, Last.fm, Facebook and Twitter in there too.  Boxee is very cool as it can become a content hub for your living room.  They even have Netflix streaming support and are coming out with their own device which will be under $200 and have HDMI, 802.11n and stream 1080p.

I will be blogging my experiences here especially when I get the device to begin using instead of my netbook for now so continue reading here to discover is Boxee is worth it or not.