Cable companies have a job to do: deliver high-quality programming to your television, enable your computers to connect to the Internet at blazing speeds, and in more recent years – drastically reduce the shock of your phone bill by using their phone service. Regarding their Internet service and their phone service, my bill has only gone up about $4.00 in the last six years, and only because of changes in government regulation and the associated fees. Some of my other expenses have increased more drastically (health care???) so I have no complaints about my Internet bill.
Their television prices are a different story. Reasons behind the increases range from infrastructure upgrades, increased expenses from content providers, supply vs. demand, and more. One price cable subscribers have never been able to get away from is their cable set-top box: the box that sits on or next to your TV that comes with its own cable-company-branded remote.
Here’s the bad news: Cable companies say you need this box to view channels on their network. Even if your TV has this functionality built-in, they still charge you for it. Over the years, the boxes have evolved from simple media converters to full-fledged High-Definition (HD) Digital Video Recorders (DVRs). Accordingly, the price you pay for this box has increased from roughly $5.00 a month to upwards of $20.00 a month.
Here’s more bad news: nobody outside the cable industry really knows how much they pay manufacturers for these boxes, but it’s likely around $200.00 since you can buy a new TiVo DVR for around $250.00, which means that if you’ve been “renting” your cable box for more than a year, those monthly fees are now pure profit to the cable company!
Here’s even more bad news: take a look at your power bill – that cable box is costing you about $30.00 per year to operate, Last year, the Natural Resources Defense Council found that an average HD DVR set-top box consumed about 275 kilowatt hours of electricity per year, whether you’re watching TV or not. That’s two-thirds the power consumption of a 21-cubic-foot refrigerator! See the full report at http://www.nrdc.org/energy/files/settopboxes.pdf .
Now here’s the good news, and my friends at Comcast aren’t going to appreciate this:
Save yourself the monthly fee of the cable box *and* the added expense to your power bill: dump the cable box in exchange for an account at Netflix and/or Hulu. You’ll get all the same great programming, your monthly fees will go down, and you’ll get rid of one remote.
Happy TV-watching!
