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TV has given us a sense of comfort in our lives, especially in the last year or two of the pandemic, hasn’t it? As for my household, TV was the biggest entertainment during the stay-home period.
Nowadays, there are many different services available for TV, including cable TV, live streaming TV, and on-demand streaming TV, etc.
Each and every service (especially on-demand streaming) is relatively reasonably priced. But this is the pitfall! If you keep signing up for more and more services just because they are reasonable, the total amount you pay for TV becomes very expensive.
Today, I’d like to share how we successfully saved $65 a month by only using on-demand streaming.
Do you need all those TV services?
Have you ever reviewed how much you are paying for your TV in total? If you haven’t, now may be a good time to do so. When reviewing our living expenses, we tend to focus on the variable costs like food, which are easy to see the changes from month to month (I often do that!). Of course, it is important to pay attention to such variable costs, but there are often clues to saving money in monthly fixed costs, such as subscription services. TV is a perfect example.
In our home, we used to have both live TV (YouTube TV), and on-demand TV streaming services. And within a year, we added three more new on-demand TV streaming services: Disney+, HBO MAX, and Discovery+. After a while, we realized the cost of TV was getting too high. Each streaming service is not very expensive, but together they become expensive. So after a lot of discussions, my husband and I came to the conclusion that we needed to delete some of the services.
At first, we focused on cutting down on-demand services, but then we realized something. The channels we often watch on live TV, we can watch on-demand TV, too. Moreover, without commercials! We just love to watch foodnetwork and HGTV, and both of them are on Discovery+.
So we made the decision to cut live TV (YouTube TV). By the way, I love YouTube TV because it’s user- friendly and has a lot of channels. If we were to bring back live TV, I would persuade my husband to sign up for YouTube TV. Back to the story, as a result of removing live TV, we were able to save $$64.99 a month!
I recommend checking what channels you often watch on live TV. Maybe the channels you watch most often are also available on on-demand TV streaming services. And without commercials!
Good things that have happened after cutting live TV
Not only being able to save $65 a month, but many good things that have happened after cutting live TV. The best thing is that I started to be able to use my time more efficiently.
This may just be a problem with me, but when I turned on the live-streaming TV, I tended to linger and watch for a long time as the programs started one after another. Especially before going to bed, I would leave the TV on, and before I knew it, I would fall asleep past midnight and have trouble waking up in the morning, repeating the vicious cycle. Maybe I should just turn off the TV; however, when one program ends and the next one starts, I find myself thinking, “I want to watch this, too.” And when a commercial for a TV show comes on, I became like “I want to watch that, too!” TV was a dangerous temptation for me.
But after we switched to just on-demand TV, my watching time decreased dramatically. Since it is “on demand”, you watch the programs you want to watch when you want to watch them. Unlike live TV where you just turn on the TV and there’s a bunch of interesting programs being broadcast, you need to decide what you want to watch first and then turn on the TV to watch it. In other words, with on-demand TV, you don’t need to turn on the TV if there is no program you want to watch.
This was a major positive change for me. I can now go to bed early and wake up early, and the time I used to spend on TV can now be spent on other more productive things. (Like this blog.)
Other good things about going on-demand only are as follows.
- Being able to shut down a lot of information that comes in with live TV, which helps you clear your head. ⇒Digital detox.
- Being able to sleep better at night.
- Can watch a program in a short time because there are no commercials, which also gives you more time for something else.
- Can watch special and exclusive programs of your favorite TV shows offered by on-demand networks
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disadvantages of removing live TV
If I write advantages, I must also write advantages. There are some disadvantages that occur when you remove live TV. I would like to share those disadvantages and how we dealt with them.
- Can’t watch news programs or information programs anymore.
There are many news and information programs on live TV. but you won’t be able to watch them anymore. At first, we thought this was inconvenient, but the news is available online as well. So, we started going online to get news ourselves. - Can’t watch sports programs anymore.
This is also the same as the news programs, you won’t be able to watch lots of sports programs that live TV has anymore. My husband and I are not particularly interested in sports, so this didn’t affect us much, but we still felt a little inconvenient when there was a sporting event we wanted to watch, such as Olympics. But even in those cases, we could check the results on the Internet, watch them on YouTube, etc.
There are also on-demand TV streaming services that deliver news and sports, so signing up for those is one way to go. You can save money if you sign up for a bundle. For example, Disney+ allows you to sign up for Hulu and ESPN as a bundle.
- The number of movies you can watch is limited.
With live TV, there are many different channels, so you can enjoy many different genres of movies. But if you have only on-demand TV, the number of movies you can watch is limited. This was sad for us at first, but then we realized if we want to watch a particular movie and it’s not available on our on-demand TV subscriptions, we can just rent it. But most of the time, the on-demand TV services we are subscribing to are sufficient.
conclusion
Don’t get me wrong, I love live TV! However, the benefits we have gained from removing it have been significant, and I’m happy with this decision. Not only we started saving a large amount of money ($65/month), but we can use our time more efficiently and also do a digital detox.
If it’s really difficult to get rid of live TV, you might want to see if there is anything you can do to cut down on the price of on-demand TV. For networks that you don’t watch much, you could make it a subscription with commercials and lower the fee. Every bit of savings can add up to a lot of money.
How many TV services do you have? Do you think your are using them efficiently?
Is there anything you are doing to save money on TV?
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