Besides Transformers, the boys have been re-discovering some gems from the past.  They’ve watched Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends on Roku via Netflix.  They don’t seem to get how cheesy it is and instead simply enjoy the superhero stories.  They’ve also watched Batman: The Animated Series and The Super Mario Bros Super Show.

It seems that some shows (or show concepts in the case of Transformers) don’t really age all that badly and kids don’t always need a flashy new show to be entertained.  Sometimes, an older show will entertain them just as much.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Do you have a show that you grew up with that your kids enjoy watching?

P.S. If you haven’t already, go visit FollowerHQ and let me know what you think of my Twitter application.

P.P.S. For a bit of fun, try my other Twitter Application, Rout. It’s a +F in Fun!

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the linky there if you are participating.

Aloha #118

tech that makes me drool.  I need to prioritize and bargain shop and Walmart is always on my bargain shopping list.  Here, in no particular order, are some tech items that I’d love to get for Father’s Day.  All of these items were spotted during a recent stroll through our local Walmart.  They are also all available from Walmart’s Father’s Day electronics page or Walmart.com.

Video Games:

Playing video games is fun.  Playing video games with my boys is extremely fun.  NHL, while not a master, has learned how to operate the controls nicely.  JSL wants to work it right, but just can’t figure it out yet.  I think he just needs more practice.  Which means I need to play more video games with him.  Oh the never-ending chores us dads must undertake!

Roku

Yes, we already have two Roku players.  One in our living room and one in our bedroom.  Why do we need a third, you ask?  Well, our upstairs room (used by the boys as a play room) doesn’t have one.  In fact, since it only has basic cable TV (and a DVD player but the DVDs are kept downstairs), that TV would benefit greatly from a Roku player.  Plus, the boys could rock out with Pandora in the larger play room space.

iPad 2

Don’t ask me how we didn’t get a photo of this.  I drool over the thought of having an iPad to use.  Oh the web browsing I’d do.  The apps I’d download.  The Angry Birds I’d fling at green pigs.  Excuse me while I get my drool mop.

LCD Monitor

I recently inherited a desktop computer that my parents didn’t need anymore.  I want to set this up to be a print/file server, but I need a monitor.  I have two CRT monitors I could use but they are big, hulking affairs.  They work fine, but they take up so much desk space.  How much nicer would it be to have this slim number on the desk instead of the giant dinosaur?

Disclosure: I wrote this review while participating in a blog tour by Dad Central Consulting on behalf of Walmart and received a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate.

Ameba is one of the many new channels that Roku provides.  Unlike others that show old movies or anime, though, Ameba shows educational programming geared towards children.  When we first browsed the selection of shows, I’ll admit that I began to get a little nervous.  Nowhere was Dora the Explorer, The Wonder Pets or any of the other “big name” shows that my boys are used to watching.  Would they take to these new shows or would they turn their noses up at them?

We looked through the Ages 2 – 5 section for a good program for JSL.  After awhile, we found Rainbow Fish.  This was a pleasant surprise because they love the Rainbow Fish book.  We watched an episode where Rainbow Fish and his friends need to welcome a new girl to their school.  A girl who doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the gang.  They both enjoyed this show.

After this, we switched over to the Age 6 – 10 section to find a good program for NHL.  I noticed Einsteinabot, a program which appeared to be about numbers and math.  NHL loves math so we tried this.  Once again, I began to get nervous.  The program had a fun song, but the look of the show wasn’t as polished as some shows on Nick Jr or Disney Junior.  I needn’t have worried, though.  NHL began singing along while JSL danced in his seat.  When the episode was over, NHL asked to watch the next one and the one after that.

It just goes to show that kids like fun shows.  They don’t care if the show uses the latest animation techniques or expensive computer generated imagery.  The shows on Ameba might not have big toy lines behind them like Dora or the Disney shows do, but they are fun and educational.  (Of course, the lack of a big toy line might be seen as another plus.)

Ameba costs $9.99 per month (though, for the month of April, they’re dropping the price to $3.99) and you can either get a set top box from them or purchase a Roku box for $60 to play it on.  I didn’t test Ameba’s box so I can’t say anything good or bad about it, but I highly recommend the Roku box for ease of use and availability of content.

Giveaway:

Thanks to Ameba, not one, not two, but three lucky winners will receive an Ameba set top box and a 3 month subscription to Ameba. To enter, simply leave a comment below answering this question: What education programs do your children watch or did you watch growing up?

You can also earn bonus entries by doing any (or all) of the following items. Just be sure to leave a separate comment for each item that you complete.  (Don’t just leave one comment listing everything you did.)

• Follow @TechyDad on Twitter. (1 bonus entry)
• Follow @AmebaTV on Twitter. (1 bonus entry)
• Tweet about the giveaway on Twitter. Be sure to include @TechyDad, @AmebaTV and a link to this post in the Tweet. (1 bonus entry per day) For example: Stream educational children’s shows from the web to your TV. Win 1 of 3 @AmebaTV set top boxes from @TechyDad http://bit.ly/gMRdRH #Giveaway
• Subscribe to my RSS feed or let me know if you already are. (1 bonus entry)
• Leave a comment on any of my non-giveaway posts from March/April. Leave a comment here letting me know which post you commented on. (1 bonus entry per comment, maximum 3 entries)
• Write a post on your blog linking to this giveaway. Leave 3 comments about this to get credit for all of your extra entries. (3 bonus entries)

To enter, please follow the rules above within the comment section. Contest starts today, March 31st and ends at Noon EST on April 14th, 2010. You do not have to be a blogger to enter, but must leave a valid e-mail address for me to contact you for mailing address once the giveaway is over. I will select the winner using random.org and contact you via e-mail. You will have 48 hours to claim the prize. If there is no response, another winner will be selected. Open to U.S. and Canada residents only.

Disclaimer: I was provided two month’s free Ameba service to review.  No other compensation was given. The opinions expressed above are my own. Ameba is also providing the giveaway item to my readers.

Later on, I actually won a Roku and tried out Netflix.  This resulted in a four part series titled Netflix, Roku and Cut Cable, Oh My!.  (Here are links to part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.)  During this series, I revised my estimates, including purchasing equipment to receive OTA signals and a TiVo box to record shows.  I also cut back on Amazon VOD and purchased DVD estimates.  At the end, I wound up estimating a savings of $40 a month.

Since it has been about year, I figured it was time for a follow-up.  First of all, our cable cord is still fully intact.  Despite our calculations of what we would save, it turns out that too many of the shows we like watching are on cable TV.  Still, our television landscape has changed dramatically in the past year and it doesn’t bode well for the future of the cable cord.

First of all, that three month Netflix trial turned into a paid-subscription.  Yes, this is $13.99 extra a month, but it is well worth it.  We get 2 DVDs out at a time and unlimited streaming.  Thanks to our Roku box, we can watch videos streaming from Netflix on our television.  The kids have taken to this the most and will watch the same shows over and over.  They even request “Roku” (by which they usually mean Netflix on Roku) over regular TV on a regular basis.

NHL and JSL have discovered classic cartoons such as Pink Panther and Rugrats and will watch their antics over and over.  (Note to Netflix and Nickelodeon: Please get more than just the first 4 seasons of Rugrats on streaming!)

Amazon VOD has gotten almost no use.  About the only time I’ve used it was when I had a credit to use up.  Even then, my purchase has gone unwatched since the boys love Roku so much.  Still, were I to cut cable, I could see buying Mythbusters this way, but not much else.  A season of Mythbusters on Amazon VOD would cost about $43.50.  At that rate, I might be better off waiting and buying it on DVD.  (I still wish Netflix could get the DVD season sets instead of the “random episode” collection DVDs.)

Paid rentals and DVD purchases have gone virtually extinct.  Yes, we’ll buy the occasional DVD, but this is a rare event.  Meanwhile, our trips to the library to take out DVDs have become a nearly weekly event.  The boys get excited to go to the DVD section and pick out 1 DVD each.  Then they can’t wait to get home and watch it over and over until it is time to return it and pick a new DVD.  This is quite a deal since it is essentially free.  “Essentially” because it is paid for via our taxes, but I can think of worse ways to spend tax money than beefing up our public libraries.  Besides, the boys almost always get books while there too.  We’ll leave with three or four DVDs and a big bag full of books.

Still, there are cable channels that we just love watching too much to cancel.  If these shows were available in a streaming model (say, via Hulu Plus, Netflix or some other provider), we would gladly subscribe to those and ditch the cable cord.  Until that happens, though, I don’t think the cord will get sliced.  Of course, as more content goes streaming and as we watch less and less non-streaming content, the cable cord’s lifespan seems more and more limited.  I’d probably be safe to declare that we won’t cut it in the next year, but I wouldn’t be as sure about the next 3 – 5 years.

Enter the LinkE. The LinkE, from Brite-View, uses Powerline Networking technology to connect your devices to your router. Put simply, the traffic flows through your router, into the LinkE bridge, through your house’s power lines, through the LinkE switch and to your device. If that sounds complicated, all you need to know is that you plug the bridge into an electrical outlet near your router, connect it to the router and then plug the switch into any other electrical outlet in the house. After connecting a device to the switch, you have Internet access.

I took the LinkE out of the box and plugged one unit in downstairs near our TV. I plugged the other unit in upstairs near our router. I was actually expecting more setup than that. I figured that I’d need to log into some administrative panel and fiddle with some settings or something. Instead, it was literally plug and play. When I hooked it up to our Roku, our Roku was able to tell that it was connected to a wired network and could use that instead of the wireless network. Before you could say “powerline networking”, Netflix movies were streaming through our power lines and onto our TV.

This was highly convenient, but it wouldn’t be much use if the speeds didn’t meet or exceed wireless network speeds. Brite-View advertises speeds up to 200Mbps, but, since my ISP doesn’t give me that much bandwidth, I didn’t expect to reach that figure. Still, I wasn’t dissappointed. The Netflix loading seemed to go faster and, when I connected it to my computer, my web page load times seemed to shrink.

Of course, I’m too much of a geek to accept “seemed to.” I want hard numbers. To quantify just how much of a boost I got, I ran six speed tests at DSLReports.com. First, I ran three using my wireless connection. This resulted in an average speed of about 1984.7 Kbps down and 988 Kbps up. Next, I ran three tests while connected via LinkE for an average of 2414.7 Kbps down and 1000 up. (I cleared my browser’s cache after each test to avoid any influence there.) The upload speeds were comparable, but the download speed improved by 22%.

Wireless Speed Test Results:

LinkE Speed Test Results:

I would definitely recommend the LinkE for connecting home theater equipment to the Internet. Nowadays, many electronics (Blu-Ray, Roku, CinemaTube, etc) come with ethernet ports. Not all come with wireless built-in. Instead of buying wireless adapters for each of these, you could hook up one LinkE and network all of our devices. The LinkE can be purchased from Brite-View. The 1 port bridge + 4 port switch model that I tested retails for $84.99.

Disclaimer: I recieved the LinkE 1 port bridge + 4 port switch model complimentary from Brite-View to test. No other compensation was given. The opinions expressed above are my own.

Thanks to the one two punch of Netflix Online and Roku, I’m pretty confident that my kids would survive a cut cable cord without too much screaming.  So where does this leave cable in our household?

For now, it hasn’t been cut, but don’t confuse being uncut with being safe.  We’re currently looking into many options ranging from cutting to going with an alternative service like DirecTV.  (Any DirecTV reps out there who want a technologically savvy daddy blogger to do a review on your service? )

My original conclusion, meanwhile, has been revised.  Previously, I determined that we would save about $15 per month if we cut cable.  However, I soon realized that that relied on two erroneous assumptions.

The first was that we would buy $15 in DVDs every month.  We really don’t buy many DVD movies because we tend to watch them once or twice and then add them to the stack.  Kids movies get a bit more play, but there’s only so many times you can let your child watch a show before you go insane.  Now, we tend to rent our DVDs via Netflix or our local library.  DVD purchases happen pretty much only if a deal is extremely good or for a Chanukah or Birthday present.  Our total DVD purchase budget is probably closer to $30 per year than $15 per month.  This increases the Cut Cable savings to $27.50 per month.

The second assumption was that we would frequent Amazon VOD.  Apart from having Mythbusters episodes, I just can’t see spending a lot of money on this service when I get essentially the same thing "for free" with my paid for Netflix subscription.  (Yeah, I know Netflix isn’t free, but you know what I mean.  I don’t have to pay $1.99 just to see another episode of Heroes.  It’s right there.)

The only thing I might pay for is the aforementioned Mythbusters.  (TechyDad want big boom!)  At $1.99 per episode and an average of 25 episodes per season, I’d only be paying about $24, or $2 per month, for this Amazon VOD.  This is far short of the $26 a month I initially assumed and raises the Cut Cable savings to $51.50 a month.

I’ve also re-thought my setup.  I don’t need to invest in a media streaming setup.  I just need to manage our existing DVDs better.  So I’ve used EMDB to catalog all of my DVDs.  I plan on making a list out of it and laminating it for the kids to refer to.  This way they’ll be able to point to an item on the list and have B or I put it in rather than wondering just what we have to watch.

The only tripping point at the moment is how we would hook our existing TVs up to receive over the air broadcasts (do we need to buy any equipment for this?) and what DVR to buy to replace our cable company issued one.  TiVo is a possibility, of course, but the monthly fee ($129 per year) would eat into our Cut Cable savings.  Still, even after TiVo, we would have over $40 left per month in savings.  The first six months of savings would pay off the purchase price of TiVo.  After that (and possibly a few months paying off equipment to receive digital OTA signals), we’d be in pure savings mode.

Alternatively, we could switch from Time Warner Cable to DirecTV.  The one year locked in rate would save us $28 per month over cable.  Either way, money talks, especially in this economy.  Unless things radically change, I don’t think our current cable connection has much of a life left in our household.

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary 3 month preview of Netflix for review purposes.  However, after my preview period, I intend to remain on as a paying Netflix member.  As stated, I won the Roku box during an online giveaway.  The reviews expressed above are my own and were not altered in any way by Netflix, Roku or anyone else.

When we last left our intrepid Cable Cutting hero, he was talking about Netflix streaming devices.  There are many of these on the market, to be sure, but my favorite is the Roku box.  This small box, and I’m talking palm of your hand small, will easily fit into any home theater arrangement.  It is easy to set up, navigate and has plenty of content available on it.

Once your Netflix Instant Queue is set up, the titles appear nearly instantly on your Roku box.  If your title includes multiple episodes, say because you’re watching The Addams Family, you can jump to a specific episode easily .  Fast forwarding and rewinding, though inexact, are simple to master.  Simple enough, in fact, that my 6 year old figured it out quickly and now is not to be trusted near the remote.  Not because he’s going to mess something up, but because he *will* fast forward/rewind/change the video when I just want to watch what’s playing.  In fact, all of the controls are easy to master.  If I hand NHL the remote, I can be certain that he will find a show that he wants to watch and will be able to play it with no problem.

The only problem we ran into was constant wireless network connection losses.  However, considering I’ve been experiencing these on my laptop as well, I think this is more of a problem with my network (more specifically, my router) than with Roku/Netflix.  Even when the network is acting funky, though, reconnecting is as easy as clicking "OK" a few times.  Assuming that the network cooperates, that is, but you can hardly fault Roku or Netflix for not being able to connect to a trouble-making router!

Since introducing them to the Roku, my children’s viewing habits have changed.  Whereas before their "default" choice was Noggin, The Disney Channel or possibly PBS Kids, they have rapidly made Roku one of their favorite choices.  Why, after all, bother with waiting until their favorite show is on when you can just click and play.  JSL has learned to ask for "Wiggle Roku" for his favorite Wiggles videos or "Bobby He Can Build It Roku" (Bob the Builder on Roku) and NHL has found enjoyment in some of my old favorites: Inspector Gadget, Super Mario Brothers and The Pink Panther.

Previously, I had mentioned how Netflix wasn’t resting on their laurels.  Well, Roku isn’t either.  While Netflix on Roku might be enough to justify the $80 – $130 price tag (depending on which Roku box you buy), Roku also offers access to Amazon Video on Demand, which has some great movies and TV shows, and Major League baseball.

Those offerings require extra purchases, however.  Amazon VOD requires you to pay for each video while MLB insists on a yearly subscription fee.  To increase the value of your Roku box, they are branching out to other content providers, most of which will be free for all.  Their Channel Guide allows you to customize your channel listing to include Motionbox, Mediafly, blip.tv, twit.tv, Facebook Photos, Revision3, Frame Channel, Flickr and Pandora.  These options just came out, so I haven’t explored them fully.  Still, I got a taste for how much more content they have just made available via Roku and I like it.  Clearly, Roku is trying to position itself as the go-to box for streamed media content.

Coming up next, will the cable cord survive being cut?

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary 3 month preview of Netflix for review purposes.  However, after my preview period, I intend to remain on as a paying Netflix member.  As stated, I won the Roku box during an online giveaway.  The reviews expressed above are my own and were not altered in any way by Netflix, Roku or anyone else.

Previously, I mentioned that Netflix is keeping up with the changing rental climate.  One of those changes is online viewing.  I’m a big believer that the future successor of DVDs isn’t going to be Blu-Ray or some other super-incredible-ultra-high-resolution disc, but no disc at all.  All of the pieces are in place or nearly so.  Internet speeds are fast enough in many areas to support video streaming. Video codecs can alter video quality to account for changes in bandwidth.  Wireless technology allows for devices (*cough*Roku*cough*) to stream Internet videos without needing any wires (save for the power cord).

In fact, online viewing, though I expected it would be good, completely changed how I and my family watch TV.  There is a selection of movies and television shows that are available for instant viewing.  This selection is admittedly smaller than the mailable DVD list, but the blame for that rests with content owners being reluctant to let their videos touch anything Internet-related.  Netflix is constantly adding new titles to this list, though and I suspect that the pressure to add videos to Netflix’s online selection will only increase.

When you find a title that you would like to play instantly, you simply press the Play button.  Alternatively, you can add the title to your Online Queue.  This is like the mailer queue except titles never arrive/leave.  They simply sit there for you to watch whenever you want.  As nice as computer-based viewing might be, it gets much, much better once you add a device such as a Roku.  Using that, you can stream the content right to your television screen.

In many ways, it is just as altering an experience as first getting a DVR was.  When we first got a DVR, was were amazed with the freedom that we had.  Suddenly, we didn’t *HAVE* to be at home to watch shows we liked.  We could record them and watch them later.  Now, we don’t have to be limited to what the TV networks are showing in our area.  We can watch old shows that have gone off the air, see shows from overseas or see titles that might otherwise suffer from a censors’ axe on network television.

Best of all, we can watch them without ever fiddling with discs.  If you are sitting on the couch at the end of a long day, you might not want to go over to your stack of DVDs, root through them to find the specific disc you feel like watching and then play it.  Instead, you might want to just sit on the couch, select a movie from your Instant Queue and hit play.  Netflix makes it that simple.  And with more and more devices supporting Netflix, you should be able to easily fit a Netflix streaming device into your budget.  You might even already have one in your home.

Coming up next, speaking of Netflix streaming devices…

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary 3 month preview of Netflix for review purposes.  However, after my preview period, I intend to remain on as a paying Netflix member.  As stated, I won the Roku box during an online giveaway.  The reviews expressed above are my own and were not altered in any way by Netflix, Roku or anyone else.

Did you notice the Pandora and Flickr channels?  If these are released, then you might soon be able to listen to your Pandora music and browse photos by family and friends via the Roku.  These would be channels four and five.  Add in a rumored YouTube channel and we might have six.  It remains to be seen what other channels will come up, but I for one am excited at the future prospects of Roku!

Of course, our cable TV doesn’t go unwatched every day. NHL and JSL watch it. B watches it. I watch it. So we can’t just rip out the cable line and pocket the monthly savings. Some kind of entertainment is going to need to replace the cable TV loss at or below the cost of cable TV. In doing research on this, here are some of the options I’ve come up with:

Rentals/Purchases

We currently don’t rent very many movies. However, we do take out a lot of movies from the library. Under a “No Cable TV” plan, I’m sure our library use would increase. Still, the library only has so many DVDs. Eventually, we would tire of taking out the same kiddy DVD for the twentieth time. This is where Netflix could step in. Netflix lets you rent DVDs from a massive selection. They mail the discs to you and you mail them back when done. Using Netflix, you can also watch an ever-increasing catalog of movies and television shows online or on your TV.

TV watching requires an “unlimited plan” ($8.99 per month or more) and a supported set-top box like Roku. Now I just so happened to have won a Roku box from Buck Daddy (thanks again!), but a Roku box would normally only set you back $99. The Roku box connects to your wireless/wired network and allows you to watch movies on Netflix or Amazon Video on Demand. Roku is also adding podcasts, MLB and others. Those don’t happen to interest me, but it does show that “Roku box content” is going to be a growing selection.

This also leads me to my next Rental/Purchase location: Amazon Video on Demand. Amazon lets you rent movies and television shows from their site to view online or on your Roku box. Some shows, like my must-watch Mythbusters, are only available on television or Amazon VOD. Television shows, like Mythbusters, cost $1.99 to buy. Movies cost more, but aren’t prohibitively expensive. A season of Mythbusters can contain 30 episodes, so this might seem expensive. However, this $60 is less than one month of cable TV. Assuming that we bought three TV shows per week (one each for B and I and one for NHL/JSL), we would wind up paying less than $26 per month on Amazon VOD purchases.

Of course, we wouldn’t just buy online shows. We could buy DVDs also. More and more shows are releasing DVDs with multiple episodes of television shows. We already have many DVDs that go unwatched, so we could dig those out. We could easily give ourselves a $15 monthly DVD stipend, saving it up if we want to buy a more expensive box set or taking advantage of sales to buy more DVDs.

In-Home Streaming

The big problem with DVDs is loading/changing them. Right now, NHL can sit down in front of the TV, turn it on, tune in to Noggin, and watch away. (He can also program the DVR, but that’s another subject entirely.) We don’t want to risk scratched discs, so we won’t be letting the kids load and unload DVDs themselves anytime soon. This means that watching a DVD would entail parental involvement to: 1) Find DVD from our ever-growing library of discs, 2) load movie, 3) put old movie away, 4) watch. It would be a lot simpler if NHL could simply browse through all of the movies we own and click which one he wanted to watch. (This shouldn’t be read as us trying to abdicate parental responsibility, but NHL should be able to choose what he wants to watch from the options we provide him.)

As it so happens, you can actually do that. I blogged awhile back that I was drooling over the IOGEAR Portable Media Player Enclosure. Unfortunately, that product looks like it has been discontinued, but others, like the Argosy TV HD Media Player ($69.99) are still on the market. If we ripped our DVDs to a 1 TB hard drive ($74.99), we could watch them on our television quite easily. Another solution would be to rip the DVDs to a central computer and stream the videos from that system (using free software like Tversity) with a wireless media player like the D-Link DSM-520 ($229.99).

Internet

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know about YouTube. There are tons of videos on there that can be enjoyed by people of all ages. I won’t pretend that there aren’t videos on there that don’t violate copyright (for example, some old Looney Tunes cartoons that I’m sure WB didn’t upload). Still, YouTube could be a good source for entertaining videos.

The same is true for Hulu. Started by some cable companies as a YouTube competitor, Hulu has a lot of television shows and movies available to watch for free. These, unlike many of the ones on YouTube, are completely legal.

The only problem with these two sites is that they are limited to your television screen. YouTube can be watched on the Wii, but it is a kludgy solution at best. My ideal solution would be for Roku to support Hulu and YouTube. Then, I could just select from the menu on Roku’s screen and begin watching. If Roku didn’t support YouTube/Hulu, then any Tversity-based solution I went with (see the “In-Home Streaming” section) would support these as well. Either way, this would be a free entertainment addon.

Final Cost

What would the final cost of cutting cable be? Our one time costs would total between $145 and $230 depending on which media player setup we went with. Monthly costs would run about $50 a month. This would mean a $15 a month savings. No, $180 per year isn’t a windfall, but every little bit counts. The first year’s savings would obviously get eaten up by equipment costs, but after that we would save money.

Another factor to consider is the multiple room problem. Right now, we have cable in two rooms: the living room and our bedroom. The costs I’ve quoted here give us only one rooms’ worth of Netflix/Amazon/YouTube/Hulu/In-Home Streaming. We have a DVD player in the bedroom, but ideally I’d like to be able to watch anything in the bedroom that we could watch in the living room. This could increase our one time setup costs by $244 – $329. With the setup costs for a two room scenario, savings would only be realized after 2 or 3 years.

Adjusting To Life Sans Cable

Obviously, doing this would be an adjustment. JSL probably wouldn’t care. In fact, he’s pretty well adjusted to this switch already given that he’s constantly asking to watch “Wa Wa Bee DD” (Wiggles DVDs in JSL-speak). He probably wouldn’t miss the loss of cable TV at all. Initially, NHL would greatly miss Noggin and Disney Channel. However, I’ve seen how adaptable he is to television change. One month Sid The Science Kid is his favorite, must-watch-every-day-or-else show. The next month it is Penguins of Madagascar. The month after that: Secret Agent Oso. A month or two after the cable cut, NHL would probably forget all about those cable channels and focus on the DVDs and other shows that were available to him instead.

How would the grown ups react? Well, we would have the biggest adjustment to make. There are plenty of programs that we really don’t care about but that we “watch” to either add noise to the room or to help us unwind mentally after a long day. We obviously wouldn’t be able to simply tune to Food Network and zone out to Guy at another diner, drive-in or dive. Movies require more mental attention than we are up for many nights. This could be solved by skewing our Netflix/Amazon/DVD rental/purchases away from movies and towards TV shows. Still, it would be a tough adjustment to make.

The Final Cut

In the end, I don’t think we’re ready to cut our cable line. I think that the alternatives to cable just aren’t as easy as cable TV (especially once you add a DVR to the mix). In addition, the equipment to support them on televisions (as opposed to a laptop screen) is just too pricey at the moment. However, I do plan on keeping an eye on this market, though. I think that this is the direction that we as a society are moving towards. Five years down the line, you’ll likely be able to purchase a Netflix/Amazon VOD/Hulu/YouTube/streaming media/whatever set top box for $100 or less. Then, cable companies will have a serious problem on their hands as people begin to question why they are cutting a large monthly check every month for entertainment that they could get more-customized for less money.