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Technology, the economy, and improving our bottom line
The economy is certainly having an effect on our household. It’s not that we are currently hurting or anything, but we are more concerned and worried about the future including future earnings. Considering the fact I am on the web full time and rely on different kinds of advertising and affiliate income and my wife is in the banking world, we have decided to cut back on certain things.
Specifically, we have decided on two things…
1. We have too much telecom in our budget. We do not use our cell phones as much as our family plan dictates, specifically me, so we will be moving to prepaid plans. We have vonage, but do not use it a ton either, so we have bumped our service down to the 500 min. a month option. We also have a data line that is used for fax and home security connections. Considering the free services like efax that exist, we will be dropping that line and connecting the home security system to the vonage ata box (after notifying the home security monitoring people of course)
Bottom line: telecom will go from $200 a month to about $50
2. We have decided to cancel our digital cable service, considering the fact that we pretty much only watch the major networks and movies on HBO/on demand. Thus we will be moving to a combination of OTA (over the air and adding in a Home theater PC box for DVR and media consolidation.
I have not decided yet specifically what to use for the HTPC solution. On the one hand there is vista windows media center. The bennies of that are the media consolidation components and a simple interface for the not so techie in my household, but there is also some crippling features, such as if we go and add media extenders to the other TV’s in the house, like something like the linksys DMA 2100, the media extenders themselves will not allow for web browsing….so using websites like hulu.com to watch speciality network programming like comedy central, would not be possible on the extenders.
On the other hand, myth TV for linux has come a long way, and might be the way to go. The bennies are that I can build a couple of htpc’s for the price of a copy of windows vista ultimate, (including the spare computers i have lying about) The downside is that it’s a little bit more difficult to use and get working properly…especially if I build one for each TV in the house ( we are up to 3 now). Another issue would be the consolidation of the media across multiple computers, and the learning curve for the others in the house.
Of course a third and fourth option is Sage TV and Popcorn Hour…hence why I have not decided yet…
Bottom line savings…home entertainment will go from about $150 a month to $10-$15 (for on demand purchases)
I’d like to hear from you if you use a HTPC solution instead of cable as well, what do you use and more importantly, do you like it or do you miss cable?
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