Saturday, October 8, 2011

Save Money on TV Viewing

These days we are all looking for ways to save money. I am no exception. I've done everything I can lately to watch the money. I even almost got rid of my phone and just used my cell phone, but the phone company cut me a cheaper rate for a few months if I'd wait.

The biggest thing I did was cut out my satellite dish bill. That's a savings of 60 dollars a month, and I know that's probably nothing for what some people spend. Yet, I still have more TV shows to watch than I have time to watch.

All I did was get a PC to TV converter and hooked up my laptop to my TV. Then I simply go to TV sites where full episodes of old and new shows are available click a couple of times and sit back and watch. List of sites with free TV shows. If you haven't heard about this, you might think it's illegal or something crazy, but it's not because CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, Cartoon Network, etc etc are all offering their programs online now. They stick a few commercials in there of course, but thankfully they usually run only about 30 seconds at a time at normal commercial breaks, which is not even enough time to go to the bathroom or to raid the refrigerator.

Of course you have to have a fast connection, which most people do these days anyway. A good computer is important, but it doesn't have to be top of the line. Mine is a cheap Acer laptop about a year old. I think it ran about 400 and something. Any trouble I might get comes in the form of choppy movement which 9 times out of 10 can be fixed by just deleting cache from the browser. I think the last time I had to update my browser and I haven't had hardly any issues at all really to speak of since then. For more details on setup.

It's really cool. Now I save 720 dollars a year and I still watch everything I want. Don't miss a thing. In fact I've got more shows to watch than I have time. I especially like the old classics like Newhart, Dick Van Dyke, Bionic Woman, Father Knows Best, and then the new stuff like Eureka, Psych, Monk, and so on. I'm really big into superheroes so I've also enjoyed watching all the new Marvel Comics cartoon shows like Wolverine and the X-men, Spectacular Spider-man, Fantastic Four and so on. I made a list to help find the locations of these shows here.

Now to address the issue of local channels I simply put up an antenna, with digital TV now available you get a very clear picture. If you are fortunate to live close to town you should definitely get an antenna. As it stands for me, I get all my local channels living about 60 miles away, but some channels have spells where the reception isn't as constant as I'd like.

If you are like me and really want to save as much as possible then this is really a smart route to go. There really isn't any reason to spend so much on cable and satellite anymore not unless you are loaded with dough of course. It's funny cause we sometimes get lulled into thinking some things are just a necessity when they aren't. Even if I couldn't pick up all these shows I'm not sure it would be worth 60 dollars a month. For that you could buy enough complete TV DVD sets of your favorite shows to keep you busy every month and then you'd have something solid to collect you could look at whenever you wanted.

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