Well after having gotten various costs like cell phones down quite a bit (they are right now at an all time high as we transition from AT&T to Verizon), but that should be a six month bump. Thank goodness for family plans!
But what about content costs, here is where we currently are:
- Comcast. This is really where most of the content comes from. Their triple play pricing is $120. To get at content cost, Internet costs $50/month while the phone is around $30/month (wow, I wish we could get rid of the phone charge, but certain devices need it). So the cost of content is about $40/month.
- Netflix. This is right now $15/month for 1 Blu-ray and streaming as well. I actually don’t find the Blu-ray that useful because it takes so long to get around it. The streaming I actually don’t use that much. There are other alternatives like Hulu Plus but that requires $8/month and watching commercials without skipping.
There there is how to view it, the question is what source device makes sense
- Tivo. Right now, I’m on a $100/year plan which isn’t too bad, but they are raising the Tivo charge to $14/month, so $150 per year. A clear action here is to drop the Tivo subscription for all but one of the devices as Tivo allows you to copy from Tivo to Tivo. So that is $150/year at least until we see if the HomeRun Prime (see below) works.
- HomeRun Prime HD. I haven’t got this box working yet, but it allows up to three streams of Comcast content across the local network so you can watch Comcast on your iPad, or on MythTV on your iMac connected to your TV. Long term this can potentially give a way to watch internet content and Comcast content from an Mac Mini to make a dumb TV a smart one đ This will need an additional Mac per TV though. And don’t know if it can work.
- PS3. I’ve been using this (not Tivo, the Netflix client is not great) to see Netflix.
