It’s been about a year since my husband and I cancelled our Cogeco cable service. We had a DVR and a single choice package and it came to about $90/month. With now two children, this money was needed elsewhere. Plus, we were watching WAAAY too much TV.

I was all for it. I grew up with only over-the-air (OTA) television and was pretty used to it. My husband though was very nervous about the whole process. But, we went for it!

Now… here we are about a year later and I can definitely say it’s been nearly painless.

What We Have Now

We now get most of our entertainment viewing from:

– A Netflix Canada subscription.
– Over The Air channels (about 8 good ones).
– Occasional rentals from Family Video.
– Borrowing from friends and family.

The Result

We now watch much less TV. As a result we’ve been making awesome progress on various personal projects. I’ve launched my first browser game and my husband is working on a novel. We also play more table-top and video games together which is very fun! We also read more which we should have been doing anyway, but I blame smart phones for my dip in reading. Gotta do better on that front.

We watch a few series on Netflix, including The Walking Dead which we are a season behind on as we wait for its arrival on Netflix grr! We watch one or two shows on OTA tv. And every summer my husband’s friends come over for a week and bring Game Of Thrones, so we get our HBO fix!

All in all, there have been a lot of quality programs that we’ve been able to watch. We said goodbye to a few, due to either difficulty to get them or lack of interest. There are also a few shows (like Galavant and The Flash) we’d love to watch, but the legal means to watch them are either missing or much too expensive. Sometimes if you fall behind the broadcast schedule on OTA shows, there’s no legal way to catch up. So, they lose a lot of viewers in my opinion.

Side note. I wonder how many of the dropped off viewers that shows tend to lose as seasons go on, are not a result of people losing interest in the show, but rather falling behind and having no nice way to catch up? I know it’s happened to me several times. Don’t you just love the “This video is not available in your country.” message? Not available? Oh well I guess my eyes aren’t available to consume your product either.

Anyway, a year later and $90 per month richer, we aren’t regretting cutting the cord one bit!