I grew up watch­ing television.

I remem­ber clearly com­ing home from mid­dle school and claim­ing the tele­vi­sion so I could watch Star Trek: The Next Gen­er­a­tion and other shows. Heck, I even watched Sein­feld when I was in mid­dle school, though I didn’t really get it. Katie, my wife, is much the same. A child raised on TV. So the idea of drop­ping our beloved cable con­nec­tion is some­thing of a chal­lenge to even com­pre­hend. But a con­ver­sa­tion with a cable-less friend drove me to do some inves­ti­gat­ing. And you all can reap the benefits.

Katie and I have talked about cut­ting cable before, our desire to min­i­mize costs being the pri­mary rea­son. The main thing hold­ing us back is our shared love for sports. Both of us have fathers who dearly loved sports and instilled in us the same fer­vent love. So the threat of not being able to catch a foot­ball game, or watch the NBA shoot hoops has caused us to sit back and refuse the idea.

But in truth I hadn’t looked into whether it was a solv­able prob­lem or not. I just took for granted that it was unsolv­able or too expensive.

So this week I began pric­ing out what it would cost to watch sports via the Inter­net. The num­bers are sur­pris­ingly varied.

Sports

To watch the NFL, you have a few options. If you’re unable to get satel­lite TV then there is the DirecTV NFL Sun­day Ticket $250 option from DirecTV, but this only gives you the 1pm and 4pm Sun­day games, you don’t get Sun­day Night Foot­ball, MNF, or any other foot­ball games. Another option, if you’re will­ing to wait until the day after, is the NFL’s Game Rewind for just $39.99, and then adding the post sea­son the price goes to $69.99.

If you fancy bas­ket­ball, the NBA has two options, the NBA League Pass has a $180 option which lets you watch all games by all teams, there is also a cheaper option at $120 which allows you to sub­scribe to just 5 teams.

MLB.tv is per­haps the most advanced for dig­i­tal offer­ings of sports. I was ini­tially con­fused as they listed the price as $25 or $20. But this is the price for the remain­ing part of the base­ball sea­son. I couldn’t find it listed cur­rently but I’m told the price for the com­plete sea­son is $120. Of those listed here, this is the only one I have any expe­ri­ence with. I had a trial of it back when I was in col­lege. I was never a huge base­ball fan, well that’s not true, I loved base­ball as a kid. But then their strike hap­pened and I fell for­ever out of love with the game. Now I only enjoy going to a game live. Any­ways, I had the trial and I watched some games with it, but base­ball has not been must-see for me so it was just a “nice to have” sort of thing.

Another one which is of inter­est to me and Katie is Major League Soc­cer. MLS Live is $60 for the full sea­son. All the games for all the teams.

Katie and I also love watch­ing Euro­pean soc­cer games such as the Barclay’s Pre­mier League, La Liga, etc. And for that I found FoxSoccer2Go, which is $170, but pro­vides Barclay’s Pre­mier League as well as a other inter­na­tional soc­cer leagues.

For those of you who enjoy Hockey, the NHL pro­vides an option called NHL Game­cen­ter. I couldn’t find any pric­ing infor­ma­tion on their web­site, so I don’t know what it costs but it’s there.

While we’re on sports that aren’t my fancy, I looked and sure enough NASCAR has an option too called Race View.

A Note About Blackouts

For most sports, this is an impor­tant caveat. These sports are almost uni­ver­sally affected by black outs, mean­ing that if you live in the same town as your pre­ferred sports team then you may not be able to watch the games. Poli­cies for black­outs vary from league to league, so def­i­nitely do some research into it!

For us it’s not a big issue as Katie and I now live in Seat­tle and our only local team is the MLS Sounders who we could pick up via an HD antenna. Oth­er­wise our teams are all else­where in the coun­try (Orlando, St. Louis, and Atlanta), thus min­i­miz­ing the chance of this affect­ing us. But obvi­ously we are in the minor­ity and most peo­ple live in the city of their cho­sen teams.

Enter­tain­ment

Now let’s talk about the sources for more gen­eral enter­tain­ment. There are three pri­mary options in my mind: Net­flix, Ama­zon Prime and HuluPlus.

Ama­zon Prime ($70) — While orig­i­nally started as an option to get free two-day ship­ping on Ama­zon, they have since expanded it to include a hefty library of dig­i­tal content. We’re already sub­scribers to Ama­zon Prime. Their library is siz­able but not perfect.

Net­flix ($8/month) — There are of course more expen­sive options if you want to rent reg­u­lar DVDs but $8 a month is for the dig­i­tal only option. That comes out to $96 a year. They’re the cur­rent kings of offer­ing and ser­vices in this arena, and they’re who Ama­zon are bat­tling with their dig­i­tal video offerings.

Third in this race is Hulu­Plus which matches Netflix’s pric­ing of $8/month, or $96/year. I’ve never really looked into Hulu­Plus but it has some unique offer­ings includ­ing their own content.

There are some com­pli­ca­tions in terms of enter­tain­ment tele­vi­sion we enjoy, such as HBO. HBO has some of the most excit­ing and addic­tive con­tent on TV right now and yet there is no way to get the con­tent or their online offer­ing HBOGO with­out hav­ing a cable account to tie it to. Yet? Maybe?

How Much Would We Save?

So look­ing over this buf­fet of options, here is where I see Katie and I pos­si­bly going:

• Sports:$180
  • NBA — $120 (Orlando Magic, four other teams)
  • MLS — $60
• Enter­tain­ment:$262
  • Ama­zon: $70
  • Net­flix: $96
  • Hulu­Plus: $96

Total Annual Cost: $442 Total Monthly Cost: $36.83

Well that’s all fine and good, but we need to know if this would actu­ally save us money or not. Our cur­rent TV and Inter­net comes from Com­cast and costs us as follows:

• TV: $112.44
• Inter­net: $55.95
• Bun­dle Dis­count: -$45.50

Total: $122.89

Which means that our “cut-cable” costs would be as follows:

• Inter­net: $55.95
• Enter­tain­ment + Sports: $36.83

Total: $92.78 Total Monthly Sav­ings: $30.11 Total Annual Sav­ings: $361.32

One impor­tant thing to note is that the Enter­tain­ment monthly cost I have above won’t be paid monthly, I just do it for com­par­i­son pur­poses. Some of the sports offer an install­ment option for pay­ment but the best deal is to pay in a lump sum.

There are a few other start up costs not cov­ered above for hard­ware, like an HDTV Antenna (prices vary but I’d esti­mate $40), and prob­a­bly a Roku box ($50). We have a WDLive Box for our stored con­tent, but it doesn’t inter­face with all of these ser­vices like Ama­zon Prime or some of the sports. But for just $50 a Roku stream­ing box will inter­face with almost all of the ser­vices I’ve listed here. On the whole though, those early hard­ware costs are eas­ily eas­ily recov­ered over the next year or so. You could do with­out a Roku box if you have a com­puter to hook up, but I’ve heard good reviews of Rokus and would pre­fer a ded­i­cated box.

Will we do it? I don’t know. It’s an inter­est­ing idea and now that I know sports are not a lim­it­ing fac­tor, and how much money it would save us, it mer­its seri­ous consideration.