Lazy Man and Money

Just Saved $33 a Month on Cable (Thanks Sookie and NFL)

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I just saved 20% on my cable in 15 minutes. I didn’t even have to fake like I was going to quit and go through their retention department to get a discount.

Instead, I just looked at my bill and realized that I was paying for two shows that I love that I no longer need. The first is True Blood. I’ve hooked since the first season when my friend said, “It’s like Buffy, but for adults.” Well, that was a boldface lie, it wasn’t similar in any way except for having vampires, but it was great in its own way.

Unfortunately True Blood was only on HBO, and only on for 3 months of the year. I scored a promotional deal on HBO, but I ended up almost exclusively watching True Blood. I don’t think I watched anything else. I tried Game of Thrones, but I just couldn’t get into it. Even with the promotional deal that comes to an absurd amount per episode. Sookie Stackhouse is awesome, but not that awesome.

The killer is that the promotion ended and I was paying $23 a month at the end. Fortunately, the series ran its course, leaving me no reason for HBO.

Next up, is the sports package with my cable company. There’s an extra $10 for a few sports-specific channels. The only one I watched was NFL Network for the games on Thursday. Turns out that CBS bought the rights to those games and is broadcasting them on their regular network. Thus I have no need for the sports package.

Combined Savings: $33/mo.

Consider this article a reminder to check your cable bill every so often. Though I guess the best way to keep your cable bill in check is to not buy these add-on services in the first place.

While I was signed in, I realized I was still getting a promotional bundle discount for having television/internet/phone from them. I don’t use the phone service, but it’s actually cheaper to get the bundle with the phone service than to get the other two services. However, next March the promotional discount ends, and I’m sure they are going to love charging me for the phone service that I don’t use.

I put the date when it expires in my Google Calendar, so I can either eliminate the phone service or negotiate something new at that time. Perhaps it is wise to put an entry in my Google Calendar every 4 months to check my cable bill and make sure it is the best fit for our needs.

HDHomeRun Prime: End Cable Box Rental Fees!

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Over the last ten years, I’ve spent nearly $2000 on Comcast HD-DVR… and it’s time for a change!

A few months back, I wrote about an article: 6 Comcast Secrets… Some of Them Dirty. One of the secrets was that you can’t buy a cable box. They hook you into renting it, month after month, year after year. If you are anything like me, you are addicted to DVR now. I have Comcast and it’s bundled into my HDTV cable box. Together HD and DVR form a lethal addictive combination. The price? $16 a month for me. That’s a lot more than our free-ish landline phone service from Ooma (taxes are still required as well as a $150 up-front fee with the hardware).

I’ve always felt that you shouldn’t be forced to rent physical hardware. I understand paying for service. Companies providing a service month after month should get fees to recoup those ongoing costs. Physical hardware like cable boxes – there’s no ongoing cost to the cable company. I’ve paid Comcast $192 a year ($16 x 12 months) for a box. Over ten years, this is where the $2000 comes into play.

One thing that I’ve always disliked about DVR service, is that it is essentially a hard drive with some software behind it. The software isn’t anything complex. In fact, there are free, open source options like MythTV. In an ideal world, consumers should just have to buy a hard drive at a one-time fixed cost, install the free software, and enjoy the awesomeness of DVR. We don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world where corporations would love to continue to collect nearly $200 a year for a piece of hardware that should cost around $200 total. Sound crazy? Perhaps. However, cable companies DVRs differ from regular cable boxes in that they have the DVR software (the aforementioned free MythTV) and a 500GB hard drive that is my total storage costs around $50 on Amazon. That still leaves about $150 for the rest of the cable box… and I’m guessing it doesn’t cost one-third that. In short, the margins for the cable companies on these products are insanely high.

A few years back people got upset that they couldn’t buy a cable box and a cable box was required to get all the channels that you are entitled to. (I could go into the difference between encrypted and unencrypted QAM television channels, but that is a whole other article suitable for a more technology heavy site). The answer to this problem was CableCARD a standard that allows the cable companies to provide you with a credit card-sized, well, card. This card can be used in televisions and other devices that support it. Good luck finding a television supporting it today. I vaguely remember seeing televisions with that option about 4 or 5 years ago. Today a search of Best Buy shows no televisions with a CableCARD slot. A search of Amazon shows a few that seem to confirm that they existed years and years ago.

The two most popular devices that support CableCARD from my mind seem to be Tivo and Moxi cable boxes. Most of you are probably familiar with Tivo, but for those who aren’t they are considered to be the father of DVR. Unfortunately, you still have to buy the hardware and there’s a monthly subscription to the service (at what appears to be $20 a month). It looks like you may be able to get lifetime service for $500 on top of the service. (It’s worth mentioning that the lifetime service is the life of the device, not the life of the buyer. Considering only one of those two can be legally considered alive, I would love to see someone challenge this marketing in court.) The Moxi box is similar to Tivo. It costs around $600 and you get free lifetime service. However, these boxes are limited in that you pay for the amount of recording space and can’t expand it without buying a whole new device (and with it a new “lifetime” of service). If your cable company offers a free CableCARD (as Comcast does), you can break even in a little more than 3 years. That’s not too bad, but it’s not great.

We can (and will) attempt to do better…

When it comes to technology, I like to push the envelope. Regular readers know that I’m weird, so this next statement shouldn’t surprise anyone. It makes my heart beat a little faster when technology enable us to do more than what we could previously do. (This is what motivates me to write an article about DVR.) I feel like this society progressing and we are getting real value for our lifestyle inflation.

So with that in mind, I present you with a couple of other alternatives to end those cable box rental fees. I present to you the HDHomeRun Prime from SiliconDust. This is a product that I’ve been watching for the last 6 months. Recently they announced that you can “pre-order” it for delivery in late July. (This should tell you the potential of the product.)

The HDHomeRun Prime changes the HD-DVR game. This is a box has it all. It connects to a Windows Media Center computer which allows you expand the hard drive space. Your recording space is not tied to the device. This big change from Tivo or Moxi mean that you won’t have to delete shows. In fact, adding 2 terabytes of external hard disk space (4 times the 500GB that I have now) can be found for around $70 (if you catch the right deal). What sets the HDHomeRun Prime apart from the competition is that it takes a CableCARD, which allows it to give you full cable box functionality and giving you all your cable channels including subscription ones like HBO.

Here’s a video explaining how it works:

This should be enough to replace a Comcast HD-DVR. However there are two other advantages. If you have a home network, you can watch the shows on the computer-DVR in any room – as long as you have an XBox or Media Center Extender. I did some research and the Media Center Extenders are a little expensive. There are some cheap options out there, but the prices are like DVR cable boxes – more expensive than they should be. I think that they’ll come down in time, but I think this feature is “a nice extra.” For some this feature allows people to get HD-DVR functionality in many rooms for a fixed price per room (at worst $200 per room for an XBox).

The other advantage is that the HDHomeRun Prime comes with 3 or 6 tuners. Normal DVRs (Tivo, Comcast) come with 2 tuners. What does this mean? With 2-tuners you can record 2 channels in real time. If you are doing that, you can not watch another show – you are limited to watching previously taped shows or one of the two that you are recording. With 3 tuners you can record 2 channels and watch a different third channel. Or you can record three channels at a time while watching a previous recording. With 6 tuners, well, let’s just say you can go ape wild with your recording – especially with the amount of disk space that you have available to you. The sky is the limit.

I know you might be thinking, “But I have to have a Windows Media Center to make this happen.” It is true. It is a string that is attached to the deal. However, I paid $300 for a desktop to put near my television and I’ve found it came with benefits without the HDHomeRun Prime. My wife and I use it to stream Hulu and Netflix. In addition we subscribe to MLB.TV to watch Red Sox games in California which saves us money over buying “MLB Extra”, the cable equivalent.

My thinking is that spending $300 for a Media Center Computer, plus $250 the 3-tuner HDHomeRun Prime gets you more features and more flexibility than Tivo or Moxi. You can go the extra mile and spend, $300 (computer), $500 for the 6-tuner HDHomeRun Prime, and $70 for a 2TB drive, and essentially not have to think about limitations with DVR. At some future point you can add another external hard drive, but I’m guessing that by that time, there will be 4TB drives for under $100.

Mathematically, the 3-tuner HDHomeRun Prime pays off still pays off in around 3 years. Although if you have a spare computer and a Microsoft Media Center license it pays off in around 14 months. It pays big dividends if you want to add more space. It is impossible to give the same comparison with the 6-tuner HDHomeRun Prime, since it has much more functionality. I can only suggest that compared to Tivo and Moxi it is a much better deal – more tuners, more flexibility to add space, access to a full computer allowing you stream many services as well as your music – it’s value is well worth looking into.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention an alternative product that was highlighted in CNET Cheapstake this week, the Ceton InfiniTV 4 tuner card. This is a card that gives you 4 tuners and CableCARD access like the HDHomeRun Prime. However, you need to install it in your computer. That’s a technological challenge for some. It also means that you have to buy an expandable computer as your media center. My wife would prefer that we get a Dell Zino (or similar small computer) to hide the cords.

Please, please (I’m on my knees), give me feedback on this idea. It is a rare occasion that I write 600 words and I’m over 1600. I’d love to convince Energi Gal (my wife) to go in this direction, but she’s very protective of her television.

I should note that as I post this I have had no contact with HDHomeRun Prime. I would like to think that they see this and send me a 6-tuner version to review. Silicon Dust, perhaps you could help me convince my wife that this is a good idea. She requires great usability which is potential deal-breaker. At this point I can’t guarantee that and I can’t risk it. I would love to write a follow-up hands-on review about how it works in a real environment. At this point, I’m handcuffed by status quo. Help me, help you!

6 Comcast Secrets… Some of Them Dirty

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A week ago, I stopped receiving some of the channels that I pay for on Comcast. The local affiliates for NBC and CVS showed a status code of “S0a00.” The “fix” was to unplug the HD DVR box and plug it back in. Essentially this is rebooting the operating system. I’m technology-minded, makes sense. The same problem occurred yesterday. This time rebooting the system didn’t fix things. This lead me down the rabbit hole to explore a number of things regarding Comcast and my cable service.

  1. There is a secret diagnostics mode – There’s a secret diagnostics mode on the cable box. If you are watching television, press power and then ok/select three times fast. You’ll get a white screen with a number of options. The fourth option for me was the Inband Status. From there I could get the value for “SNR” (Signal to Noise Ratio). From the channels that weren’t comming in the reading was 27 dB. On the good ones it was 33. You want a range between 33 and 37.
    2. [survata]

  2. Replacing the DVR means you lose your shows – The technician that fixing my cable service today saw my old box and said he would upgrade me to a new one as part of the fix. I didn’t have much of a choice. The shows live on the hard drive of the box, and they can’t open up the box and switch out the hard drives. Technologically this is very, very possible, but it seems that Motorola specifically didn’t build the boxes to allow for it as a hot-plugable drives would be fairly easy. My guess is that they were worried people would start using the drives with other hardware than their own, download them, and share them over the Internet.
  3. There is a “black” HD DVR with double the hard drive space… – I asked if the new box I’d be getting would have more space. It’s been four years. The 500GB hard drive that was probably $150 at the time could easily be replaced with a 2TB hard drive, for a cost of around $80 – probably much less with a bulk purchase. The technician mentioned that there’s a “black” HD DVR with double the hard drive space. I asked how I go about getting one and what the upgrade fee would be. He said that you just had to be lucky, its the same cost as the other DVR. I don’t understand the model. It is like buying an iPhone and getting either a 8GB or a 16GB version at random.
  4. You can’t buy a cable box (sort of) – I don’t know if this is really true. I’m still trying to figure it out. I thought there was legislation that made it a requirement for cable operators to sell the boxes instead of renting them. I spent some time searching the web today and I couldn’t find a way to buy a cable box. Mostly people in forums were asking and the answers were that you could try to buy one Ebay, but it most likely stolen and the cable company wouldn’t activate it. The cable companies don’t sell the boxes. The technician mentioned that I could get a Tivo and use a CableCard. That would lock me into Tivo fees though. I bet I’d be giving up the On Demand feature and possibly others. From a technical standpoint, the hardware on the box is probably less than $100 and there is a lot of free DVR software out there. We are paying $192 a year, which adds up.
  5. You can buy a cable modem – You can buy them on Amazon – Motorola Surfboard SB5101 Cable Modem. The $50 investment will pay for itself in about 6 months. It’s one the best, fastest moves you can make to save some easy money. I can’t figure out why I can purchase a cable modem, but not a cable box.
  6. Comcast will have be experiencing Sun Outages soon – While I was waiting to tell Comcast my problem with the service, a recording mentioned that there are planned solar outages. Turns out that twice a year there’s a solar phenomenon that impacts the satellites and causes brief outages for brief periods – 15 minutes or so. This struck me as odd because Comcast is a cable service not satellite. However, in thinking about it in more detail, the stations are routinely broadcast by satellite. This is more of a “huh… I didn’t know that” secret… and it’s not just a Comcast phenomenon.
    7. [/survata]

The research about not being able to buy a cable box, lead me to do quite a bit of research… actually a lot of research. In the next couple of weeks, I will likely expand on this in greater detail. That’s if I have the “Moxi”.

Cutting the Cable TV (Part 2)

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Over three years ago, I posed the question of whether I could cut cable TV from my life. It’s odd to look back on the online media landscape over that time. YouTube was less than two years old. Hulu wasn’t announced yet. Finding a Redbox or DVDPlay in your town was a rare joy. Streaming video was so new to Netflix that they didn’t have a Instant Queue until a little more than two years ago.

At that time I tried to cut cable television, I’d need three things:

  • Polished DVRs with no subscriptions. I can’t have the OS crashing on me. I need an interface that everyone can use. Perhaps this is not a problem. I’ll need to research this. There is likely going to be a one time cost. Perhaps I can get something pre-built on Ebay.
  • Slingbox and good bandwidth. The original Slingbox’s picture is okay for most television viewing, but it’s tough on sports with small details such as a baseball or football.
  • I need to get one of those HDTV antennas. They are cheap and easy to get on the Internet. I’ll probably pick one up this weekend.

Looking back at that a few things jump out at me…

  1. The idea of putting a Slingbox at a friend’s house and sharing a cable connection was a total cop-out. I think it was a great idea at the time considering the lack of alternatives, but a lot more can be done today. Some people mentioned it was even against Slingbox’s terms of service. To those people, I’d just say that I believe a company has to offer a service to offer a terms of service. If you buy a product that requires no service, you are free to use it as you see fit (as long as it is within the laws of the US).
  2. The HDTV antenna that I tried was horrible. I think I simply went too cheap on that.
  3. I was a horrible writer who relied on lists too much… even for short items that don’t require lists like this one.
Cutting the Cable TV
Cutting the Cable TV


My idea of cutting the cable had been dormant after my failed attempt three years. Recently four factors have resurrected the idea. We had an accidental deletion of an episode of Glee (yes guilty as charged) and I had to resort to Hulu to catch up. I had a conversation with some friends who I haven’t seen in some time and they mentioned dropping their cable. They are exclusively using a combination of Netflix, Hulu, and MLB TV – a subscription service streaming live Major League Baseball games over the Internet. CNN Money says that 1 in 8 people will drop cable and satellite in 2010, which led to Lifehacker asking what would you need to ditch cable television? Finally, I learned that a new co-worker is quite adept at building polished media boxes from open source software (with no ongoing subscriptions) and he’s willing to help set me up with the software if I buy the hardware. This interface would give us easier access to Hulu and Netflix.

The mitigating factor is not that I won’t have enough to watch if I cut the cable. It’s not even the quality of what’s available online. The combination of Netflix and Hulu would give me more TV than I should be watching anyway. The problem is with live television – particularly sports. Like my friends, baseball wouldn’t be much of an issue because of MLB TV. That would cost us $110 a year. However that represents a savings from what we pay our cable company for MLB Extra Innings for out-of-town coverage of our beloved Red Sox. The next problem is getting NFL games. There is no NFL equivalent MLB TV available in the United States. It’s not because the NFL can’t do it, but it’s because DirecTV has paid the NFL handsomely so that they can have much of the exclusive rights to out-of-town football games. Since I don’t have DirecTV anyway, I’m still stuck going to the sports bar to bar to watch the Patriots. The only loss here is the ESPN coverage of Monday night games (2 Patriots games this year).

Have you cut cable television? If so, do you have any tricks or secrets that I missed?

Save Money on Television

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In the past I’ve given a few tips on saving money on television. One of my more popular articles in the past suggested that it may be possible for people to cut their cable television completely. To recap here where those tips in nut-shell:

  • Pay More for Television – Sounds counter intuitive, but if it saves you from paying $20+ at the movies every night spending a little more on television can be a savings. I paid around $150 last year to watch all the Red Sox games on television (I live in San Francisco, so I had to by the MLB Extra Innings package). I would have easily run up a much bigger bill going to sports bars for 6 months. Another example is to get DVR if it allows you to watch shows in less time and get you back to being productive. Time is money… and that can be money well spent.
  • Get an HDTV Antenna – This should be easier with television stations being required to upgrade soon. Most that I watch are already in HD… except for those pesky out of town sporting events.
  • Look into a Sling Box – I’ve found that baseball is very watchable from my brother’s Slingbox. Football isn’t as watchable in my opinion. The players are too small when it’s zoomed out – especially with the less than 100% resolution. Note, I’ve heard this against the terms of service with Slingbox. I have to be honest, I don’t really read the terms of service when I buy an electronic product that bills itself as not requiring a service payment. I don’t really understand how it can be as watching out of town sports was the reason it was invented (if you’ve read about the founders).

Save Money on Your Cable Television

  • Call up Your Cable Company and Threaten to Switch – Often times they’ll give you a cheaper rate if you pretend like you might switch. I hate using it like an empty threat, but fortunately the cable company sets me up perfectly. I ask them if they are going to carry every Patriots’ game this year. I know they can’t because DirecTV has an exclusive license with the NFL for out of market games. They know this isn’t an empty threat since I pay for the MLB package. I have strong incentive to switch to DirecTV – the only reason I don’t is because I’m Lazy. I don’t tell them that I’m lazy, but I ask them to give me a price worth staying for. It usually gets me a good deal for a year.
  • Check for Promotions – A lot of the time a cable company will have a promotion for acquiring new customers. On one hand it makes sense for them to dangle a carrot to get someone from another provider to switch. On the other hand, you should get something for your years of loyal service. I play the loyal service card when I can.

Even More Ways to Save Money on Your Cable Television