Why Paying for TV is Dead

This isn't an anti-cable or and anti-satellite TV ad.

This is an anti-establishment ad.

The days of paying for your quick entertainment are gone. No more dealing with the cable company. No more flipping through hundreds of channels that you never watch anyways, but you keep flipping just in case something is worth watching.

Here, instead, are the days of watching only what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, and for no more money than what you already pay for the internet.

And before I end up sounding like a Hulu ad alone, I am advocating any and all TV service on the internet.

Not too long ago, the only way you could get more than five grainy channels was if you paid a high price for cable or satellite television. And out of those hundreds of channels you got, you know that you only watched at most ten of them.

Hence the future.

My wife and I decided when we got married, since she's a med student, we'd try and save as much money as possible on entertainment bills. So we rarely see movies in the theaters (the last was the latest Harry Potter midnight showing, because we're nerds), we rent movies from the library, and we don't pay for cable. We instead have my old Dinosaur laptop hooked up to our nice big TV, and watch Hulu, shows on the networks' sites, and another awesome site I won't name because it's most likely illegal (they have TERABYTES of TV on demand).

And we pay one internet bill.

For local news and the illusion of channel flipping, we bought a $15 digital antenna at Target and watch the local stations in HD, as well as our favorites (The Office, Fringe, LOST, House) live.

When I set up the internet, the guy sounded surprised that we didn't want cable TV hookup as well as internet. "Hardly anyone wants that," he said scoffing. "Yeah, I know. We just want to keep it simple," I said.

I didn't tell him what we were planning on doing.

In terms of money, we save around $40 every month, which translates into almost $500 a year.

In terms of time, we don't sit around and flip through hundreds of channels. If there's something we want to watch, we go find it on Hulu or FOX.com or The Other Site I Won't Name Because It's Awesome.

We watch what we want, when we want. No more, no less.

It's fun sticking it to one man by totally going along with another one.