How To Cut The Cord From Cable TV

welcome everyone I'm really excited to be talking about a topic that I love discussing it is how to cut the cord from cable TV and this is the topic that I really like because I have cut the cable cord myself I have helped some other people do it first of all you probably enjoy cable television right now you get a bunch of channels it's probably something you've had for years cutting the cord is just a metaphorical term for cutting that cable that comes into your home that feeds you that cable station and that can potentially save you a lot of money so what we want to do here is just kind of walk you through the process of how that works and how to do it now I do want to stop here and just say in this presentation I'm going to share with you a lot of different services that are available some different products that are available I'm going to share with you some very basic price ranges on stuff I am not endorsing anything we don't have any relationships with anything I'm not even recommending anything and I'm not saying any of those numbers are accurate companies and those Services change their prices all the time so just keep that in mind as you're going through this definitely check with any service provider before you sign up with them exactly what the terms are so what we're going to do today is we're going to cover what is cutting the cord I'm going to explain why millions of people are doing it and then I'm going to give you a process here for how to do it if you are so inclined so first of all what is cord cuttings you are probably familiar with your big cable company that big cable company when you signed up for cable sent up big cable van out to your house to install that they Ram a line into your home and if you are like me you actually got multiple services from your big cable company I get my internet service from them which is a wireless wi-fi network in the house the average monthly bill for a home in America is fifty four dollars for Internet service I also got my cellular phone service to that company as well so some of you might do that at the average cell phone bill is 80 a month but the one we want to focus on here and the one that's most common is that cable that runs in there carries a TV signal and it connects to a cable TV box in your home which connects to your TV and that bill is a whopping 107 a month on average so a lot of people are spending money we're going to focus on that third part of the Court here from your big cable company now why do people cord cut the answer might be obvious but I don't know that a lot of people realize how many people are doing in fact in 2018 33 million people cut the cord so so three million people a month nearly are riding themselves a cable on what's the big reason it really has to do with that price point that we were talking about 107 a month if you were to eliminate cable from your life over the course of a year you would save 1284 that is real money that you're paying out for television right now and the other reason it will go into this in some more detail too is freedom so if you subscribe to TV over the internet as opposed to TV over a cable it actually can provide you more freedom because now you can get your TV service anywhere that you have an internet connection so you can still watch cable-like television on your TV at home watch it on your tablets watch it on your cell phones I'll talk some more about that but that's a really big Advantage actually of not being tethered and restricted to your home to watch your television so how do you cut the cord if you're getting cable television right now you're probably enjoying those Services the cable companies pumping that service in your home you just go ahead and call them up and cancel your service the only thing you're probably gonna be left with is static and snow that's probably no good you're probably gonna feel the pain of having no television at all so the first option for you is what we call getting an antenna and some of you might be referred to as rabbit ears if you're of a certain age you might remember when TVs had two and 10A on the top of them but that's not what they look like these days in fact what they are generally a very thin sheet of plastic about the size of a sheet of paper and they're often black like this they often have some suction cups because you want to put these generally in a window and so you'll buy one of these antenna put it in the window and then run the cable from that antenna and just plug it right into the back of your TV and then you'll go to the menu on your TV and you'll look for something called channel scan and you'll select that and what it'll do here is it'll go through all of the channels on the television looking for where it's getting a signal and then when it's done and I'll tell you depending on the number of channels that you have available in your area it may take a couple minutes it may take 10 or 15 minutes here in the Chicago area when I did it it took a little while to find all the channels but then it will either show you all the channels or you can just start scrolling through those channels here in Chicago there are I think over a hundred channels that are broadcast free to people via the antenna and actually this whole process is pretty easy to get started the antenna like this is about 13 so you can buy them on Amazon or Walmart and they just plug right in now this whole process is generally called over-the-air or OTA and that's because these are usually in the downtown area from TV networks that are broadcasting a signal over the air and you're picking it up on your antenna so this is all free no monthly subscription in many ways you get all your network stations you get PBS you get a bunch of these types of the more traditional TV stations now you may be saying hey that's great and that's a great start I don't have any bills but what about cable Pete I really love cable I like some of these premium channels I like my Comedy Central or some of these other things here's where you can add on to this right so what we're going to talk about now is Internet TV or streaming TV over the internet and that's going to be provided through your internet and usually over say your Wi-Fi network router at your home so if you have internet and Wireless internet at your home this is probably going to be the easiest way to get it so I want to back up here a little bit because I think it's going to be a little easier to understand how this works if you understand how you're getting cable right now there's really two pieces to it you subscribe to a service from your cable company for me it was like a 200 channel package but they have 300 channel packages 75 channel packages Kid Entertainment Sports heavy packages right there's all sorts of packages it goes with subscribe to and that is really the piece here that you're gonna choose before you figure out how you're going to get as Deliverance you're going to get that service first in the same way that you get cable then that signal is sent to your home and then converted by your cable box this is probably a box that sits under your TV and it connects to your TV it decodes it for your television so internet streaming TV is very much the same thing in fact you're going to subscribe to a service first right so you're going to decide what service you want and that service is going to be delivered over the internet but now you're gonna need to receive that at your TV so you're gonna need some sort of Internet streaming device and this is a picture of a pretty General one they're usually two pieces it's a remote control and it looks like a thumb drive and this thumb drive will plug into the back of your TV and that's what's going to receive the signal and broadcast it on your television okay how do you set this up it's really simple you do not have to be a techie you don't have to worry about flashing noons on VCRs or anything like that really you take the small device it looks like a thumb drive and you're gonna plug it into the port on the back your TV called the HDMI port so it's really as just simple as plugging it in and powering it on really there's nothing to do beyond that it is probably the simplest Tech setup that you can imagine once you get it plugged in and powered on you're gonna see a setup screen on your television and you're going to use the remote that comes with it to just walk through that you're going to pick your language you're going to pick your Wi-Fi network you're going to have to enter your Wi-Fi network password that's really it you might want to set up an account but it's really straightforward and really simple and now you've got your internet streaming device connected to your TV and it's ready to go one of the ancillary benefits one of the things that I was really surprised about is this is a picture of a Roku remote it's called the Roku enhancer mode it comes with a lot of the the standard rokus but what's really nice about this because it plugs directly into that HDMI port it will also control your the functions on your TV like volume and mute and the power button and so what's really nice is if you have a cable box remote and a TV remote and maybe one for your Soundbar or something like that this remote will control everything and so it's funny that a simple device like this at some of these lower price points and it's such a very simple remote often replaces all of these other remotes so you don't have to worry about inputs so it's really a nice feature one that I discovered happily that I wasn't even expecting so let me talk to you about some of the popular streaming devices so one is if you have a smart TV TCL branded TVs are usually Smart TVs some of the Samsungs some of the vizios they have Smart TV components and so they'll say usually Smart TV on the Box means you can install some apps that connect to your home Wi-Fi network if you have that you may have everything you need to get started right away but if you don't if you have an older TV a dumb TV like I did you're gonna need some sort of device to receive your internet TV to plug into it the rokus are probably one of the most popular ones out there in the price point really drives that in fact the Roku started about thirty dollars you can buy some of these used on eBay but they're really inexpensive and they're really great devices Amazon also makes their own device called the Amazon Fire TV stick another great device that looks very similar remote similar device to plug in there if they're slightly more expensive it's starting at about forty dollars they have some different versions of that and if you like the Apple ecosystem you like streaming from your MacBook or iPhone Apple TV also has a streaming device it's quite a bit more expensive it starts at about 150 so you have a bunch of different options here but I will say they generally do the same thing so to me there's not a really a lot of good reasons to spend more money on the device than you need to the second thing now that you have the device connected to the TV is you have to pick a TV service in a package so I want to decode this because this is where it gets confusing for some people sometimes but it's actually pretty simple there's really two types of services out there there's live streaming television and then there's on demand television and I'm going to explain the differences in some more detail here but live TV is really going to be a replacement for cable so if you really like cable if you like the experience of having the channel guide you like surfing that's going to be the service for you if you like to sit down and just decide what you're going to watch at any one point on demand is going to be a better service for you now a lot of people have both of these and we'll talk about why but because the price points really make it so first of all if you're one of those people that you say hey I really like channel surfing I really like turning on my TV and kind of scrolling through and just being able to turn on the news or flipping off when there's a commercial to another Channel then a live Internet TV streaming service is going to be for you this is a screenshot of what this will generally look like and in fact what you'll actually have is a a channel guide that will look very much like cable you can go up and down you'll have everything listed by the channels it'll be all the same things that are streaming on regular cable television you can slide to the Future and come back to the present and when you slide to the Future you see something you like just like on cable you can set it up to record so live TV streaming services usually have a DVR or digital video recorder so that you can record things and watch them at your leisure record an episode record a series what have you now a couple other advantages of Internet TV is when you do this is that usually those recordings on your DVR with cable are on that box that sits on their TV so there's some limits to how much it can record Internet TV because it's recording to the cloud on their servers sometimes they have some limits like sling has I think it's 50 hour or 100 hour limits by default some of the services like YouTube have no recording limits so you can record an unlimited amount of chosen movies which is a really great feature too but this is really a great replacement for cable it takes almost no training to adjust from it now I want to show you some of this live TV streaming services that are out there and they really come in three different categories there are free services there are what I call cheap Services they're pretty low price points starting at about 14 going up to about twenty dollars and the reason they're cheaper is that they are often smaller Channel lineups and they usually drop the channels that are more expensive particularly like sports channels or local channels so you get a little bit of a smaller channel package but it's pretty robust mostly because they don't have the higher priced ones and then you can get premium internet streaming TV services and those start at about forty dollars go up to about fifty dollars you can certainly go up higher you can get larger packages more Sports focus more local channels some premium channels those types of things and so you really have three tiers now the free TV services are pretty impressive if you go to pluto.tv you can download the app watch TV on your phone I will say that the channel lineups probably won't be as robust and then also you'll probably see commercials right so if their commercial comes on while you're watching the view or something like that you're gonna have to watch the the commercials now the services are really great too Philo starts at 16 I believe sling starts at 20. they offer a pretty nice channel lineup some DVR Services really nice packages across the board generally for twenty dollars and these are the ones that you might not get ESPN or some of the other high cost channels in them now if you really want full cable replacement you want all those channels you want the premium channels but you want to be able to add on the NBA channel or something like that at some point services like DirecTV now YouTube TV are really the big ones here in fact most of these will have not only DVRs but some of them will have unlimited DVR recording and that's really the kind of the benefit here so again it's really tied to the price point but as you might be able to see here even at 50 a month we're still quite a bit less than that typical cable bill now we talked about live TV streaming service for channel servers for people who like cable but now I want to talk about on-demand TV services and that's really exactly what it sounds like it's on demand so a service like Netflix is probably the most popular On Demand internet TV service sure you would log in they're not streaming anything there are no live channels you'll scroll around just look at genres look at different movies TV shows whatever it might be and you're going to pick to start watching any of those at any particular time so there's nothing like a channel guide per se it's just you decide what you want to watch when you want to watch it and you can come back to it when you want to watch it this is what a lot of people think streaming TV over the Internet is but like I said there's really two different versions of it now in the on-demand world there's also a free services and there are also premium services but even the premium services in this case really are only about 10 to 15 a month so they're pretty affordable as well the free services are usually free because they are commercial supported so services like crackle 2B TV and if you do buy a Roku device you get access to the Roku Channel which has a bunch of movies and TV shows for free and so I actually watched a movie on Crackle a couple weeks ago because it was the only service that actually had the movie that I was looking for and what ends up happening is that every 20 or 30 minutes or so they run like three commercials on it it's very much like regular TV if you're familiar with how you used to watch TV live and so you just have to watch commercials and that's the benefit of it and you don't have to pay anything so there's quite a bit of a good selection there now if you do want to pay for a premium service one you'll probably get a much wider selection Netflix has a huge robust selection they also create some of their own content they have both movies and TV shows and there are no commercials so for 13 dollars a month you get all of that if you have an Amazon Prime membership you'll have access to Prime video that's another very popular one and Hulu is another big player in the space again the prices on these are pretty affordable and you get a really big selection which is nice now installing your service so whether you've picked live TV or on demand TV maybe you've decided to pick both you want a cable replacement and access to Netflix Library whatever it is what you'll do now is you'll go back to the TV you've gone ahead and set up your device and that device is actually like plugging a smartphone into your TV it's really turned your TV into a smartphone and so you'll go to the App Store on that devices menu and you'll see apps for pretty much every TV service out there whether it's Netflix or Hulu YouTube slang Pluto whatever it is so you'll just want to scroll around or search for it and then download that app or apps and then open up the app and log in and you're Off to the Races and you'll be able to start watching your favorite TV shows your favorite documentaries favorite action movies and again for a lot of us like me who was used to cable for so many years it took no training at all I felt just like back in the cable world so really awesome and easy way to do it now if you were like me you might be a little leery about cutting the cord quitting cold turkey right for something you've had for years that's how it was for me and my wife but the way we did it and the strategy that might work for you is we actually bought the device to start so we bought an internet streaming device remember you need a device and you need the service and we started with a Roku um like I said you can get some of these online for really good prices or you can go on eBay even buy a used one it doesn't really matter and then what we did was we started subscribing to some of these services using their free trial so a lot of them will give you a week free or a month free and that's a great way to try it out and in fact during this period of time where I was trying to figure out if we could cut the cord I probably had 60 or 90 days of free television which was pretty nice too feel free to leverage those free trials where they're available and then actually once we started using it we got acclimated very quickly and probably within about a week we were ready to cut the cord from cable and like I said after that we still had a couple months of free television but we found that we just weren't even using cable anymore we wanted to keep both of them just in case we couldn't make the adjustment but it was so easy so seamless that a few days later we weren't even turning on cable so what I did is I called the cable company and cancel it right then so we started saving ourselves some money but it's just nice because then you don't have an in-between period where you're without TV and you can move at your own pace on it so the big reason why people do it again you might see a monthly cable bill like this a 200 channel package for 69.99 you probably rent those cable boxes and if you have two cable boxes in your home you probably could charge for each of those boxes in my case my cable charged me for the HD an HD feed for high definition and then a bunch of taxes get loaded on that you can easily be at that standard monthly cable bill of 107 a month and if you want to go to over-the-air just pick yourself up an antenna that's going to cost you nothing per month and so you can save yourself one thousand two hundred eighty four dollars like we talked about but here's the best part let's say you say hey I don't want to just go cold turkey and just stick with network television you want a cable replacement on top of that you buy a device like a Roku or Amazon Fire stick you subscribe to a premium package something that's robust so that you don't miss out on anything that you wanted it's still Gonna Save You 684 dollars a year uh you can almost keep yourself whole cool but put more money back in your pocket and this is the real reason that people are just bailing on cables so quickly the other reason and the reason that people don't think about I think is the freedom here so yes if we want to sit on the couch on the weekend or the evening or the afternoon and watch TV we can watch it just like we always have right on our TV but because it's over the internet and it's not over a cable that comes into your house I can watch TV on my smartphone or on my tablet when we went on vacation this summer we were watching all of our favorite shows at the beach at the hotel on our iPads because the TV service follows the internet not your home television and so you can stay up to date on your TV shows watch those things in your DVR it's really freeing it's actually a lot easier in a lot of ways I hope you got the impression needed thanks everyone have a great day thanks

Channel: Expedition Money

Views: 6,493

Keywords: success, money, wealth, rich, investing, investments, financial independence, retirement, financial freedom, cash, passive income, real estate, investment property, cashflow, stock market, stocks, crypto, currency, mutual funds, affiliate marketing, entrepreneur, side hustle, income, business

Id: JZ0RJU9UrTo

Length: 19min 4sec (1144 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2023