Short answer: Maybe. Read on for the longer answer.
For years I tried to avoid paying the “cable box rental fee.”
Why? It makes no sense.
For years we could plug a coaxial into our TVs and get cable television. The technology worked and we liked it!. Now my cable company (Cox) requires me to rent a small box to do what we did before. It’s very cheap at just a couple dollars a month. We’re lucky in that in that we can use that for the bedroom television… I have bigger fish to fry than worry about around $30 a year.
However, I can see that being more than a hundred dollars a year for some families with more televisions. When the kids grow, I can imagine them wanting their own televisions. (I’m not saying that is going to happen, but it is a bridge to cross.)
The cost of DVR is a different story. Historically, a DVR is essentially a cable box with a hard drive in it. They cable companies often jack-up the price to $15 a month for this hard drive. It’s not even a big hard drive. Also these boxes are greatly run-up your electricity bill.
I say, “historically”, because many cable companies are adding a cloud service to the package. It is a good value, but not something that is worth paying a monthly subscription fee for. (Tech people know to look into Plex and other ways to stream their media.)

That sums up my problem with cable companies and their boxes/cloud. It doesn’t need to be charged as a recurring service, but they do it anyway. At $15 a month, it’s $1800 for one box over 10 years.
Wouldn’t it be nice to just buy it once for a couple of hundred dollars and be done with it?
For years, I believed that wasn’t possible. I got so frustrated that I created my own DVR with a Windows 7 computer and HD Homerun Prime.
So imagine my surprise when I read this Yahoo Finance article. It’s authored by David Pogue is super-star in technology journalism.
However, what I found interesting is that the article doesn’t give a popular marketplace to buy it. He doesn’t suggest Amazon, Best Buy, or Frys as possible places to buy. Instead he lists “Cableboxandmodem.com” and doesn’t even link to it in the article. Aesthetically, Cableboxandmodem.com doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence (I know I shouldn’t throw stones.)
It’s all very weird and I don’t know what to think. What do you think? Would you try to buy a cable modem through a website like this?