Creeva’s World 2.0

Life­hacker posed the ques­tion how did you break the TV habit? Since I can’t post on the life­hacker com­ments due to their screen­ing process that I haven’t yet passed and I’m too lazy to go through I thought i would place my answer here.

I was a crea­ture of habit that even when I wasn’t watch­ing TV it was on and would watch TV “set­tling” for shows — I mean there are very few peo­ple that watch the Magic John­son Show or Becker before they went to bed just because it was on and some­thing to watch.

One of the major changes has been tech­nol­ogy, both the advance­ment of it and the lack there of. When we pur­chased our new house about a year and a half ago we picked up cable imme­di­ately and the glut­tony of tele­vi­sion kicked. After the intro­duc­tory period of 29.99 a month ended and the bill went up to 59.99 a month we sat and ques­tioned if we really needed it.

It seemed that we were only watch­ing law and order 99% of the time — since it was always on. Since I was a big DVD pur­chaser I looked at this as being 1–2 box sets of other DVDs that I cuold buy that month instead of cable. At that point we ditched cable. Our house is far enough from the major cities that we get one sta­tions and even that is 75% snow. This meant no more live tele­vi­sion for us. We started watch­ing the shows we liked via stream­ing media on the com­puter we have hooked up to the tele­vi­sion or via our laptops.

Slowly I got out of hte buy­ing a girth of DVD’s and sub­scribed to net­flix — this saved my money since in the 5 months I’ve had net­flix I have only pur­chased 3–4 DVDs that I really want com­pared to the 10–15 I would have pur­chased otherwise.

Net­flix and stream­ing mean that there are no more late nights watch­ing Becker or Sis­ters because noth­ing else is on. I no longer have to set­tle and the process of going to a web­site and mul­ti­task­ing is a lit­tle bit more active then tra­di­tional TV viewing.

So by using stream­ing and net­flix I watch more shows that I want to watch when I want to watch them. I also save money. Net­flix is 16.99 a month com­pared to the 59.99 for cable and the other 100.00 a month I would have spent in DVDs. My qual­ity of life has actu­ally improved since I don’t waste time on shows like the Magic John­son talk show any more (yes I real­ize that was can­celed long ago but I wanted and apt com­par­i­son to the bot­tom rung of tele­vi­sion I was on).