What is it like to cut the cord from pay TV? What’s working, what’s missing, and what kind of equipment does the best job replacing the cable box? In our new weekend series, we’re asking cord cutters to tell us about their experience. This week, one of our readers talks about PlayOn, the WD TV Live Plus and Hulu Plus.
My family are cord-cutters and we now primarily get our TV fix with WD TV Live Plus, Netflix & PlayOn (which includes Hulu & CBS among many others). We’d previously cut the cord for six years, but when we moved from the country to the city in May of 2009, we decided to give cable a shot. Over a year’s time I found I was increasingly dissatisfied with the cost-benefit ratio. I felt we were paying way too much for what we were actually getting out of it. I also found that everyone in my family was watching some awful show just because “it was on.”
At the time I had a PS3 which I used as a networked media-player. In the fall of 2009 I discovered PlayOn and started exploring it using my PS3. Ultimately I disliked the PS3 as a media-player. In January of 2010 I purchased a WD TV Live, which blows the PS3 out of the water in media-player terms, and in June I purchased the WD TV Live Plus. My wife lost her job in July of 2010 and we obviously had to make some serious budget cuts and one of the first things to go was the cable TV (and cable phone). We kept Comcast’s Internet service and decided to make a go of Internet TV. Almost 6 months later we’ve never been happier with our setup and we’re saving about $80 a month!
As a side note we did try Hulu+ for 3 months but we canceled at the end of October, before the price-drop was announced. I felt that $9.99 was way too much to be paying for what the Plus service offered over the free service, and I still feel that $7.99 is too much. Until the Plus service improves it is simply not worth the cost unless you’re limited to using the Plus service on whatever device you may be using.
We got this email from a reader called Dylan. Want to ask him a question, or suggest additions to his setup? Then respond in the comments! Feel free to send in your own cord cutting story to cordcutters@gigaom.com, ask us questions on Twitter @cordcutters and check out the most recent episode of our weekly web series Cord Cutters below:
Image courtesy of Flickr user mikemol.
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