I am sure you are familiar with Dish Satellite TV and Direct Satellite TV both of these services are quite expensive. I know our TV bill with Dish was the 80 channel choice , plus local channels, and a local sports channel so I could get major league home games for the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Colorado Rockies when we were in Colorado. That combination cost us $125 a month. We had no premium channels.

In the search to find a combination of items to get the channels we wanted I put together a combination of services and am now paying much less. The first thing that you need is an unlimited internet service, a service that does not restrict the usage without throttling after you use the limit or you are required to purchase extra megabytes. Century Link and Air Beam are services in this area that do not limit usage. There is a problem with those services if they do not give you at least 10 mb’s of internet speed. The service will greatly restrict your ability to run TV services if it does not offer 10 mb’s of speed. Trepec offers 10 mb’s in speed for a very affordable price of $55 a month and is consistent with a very low down time. Cox also offers this service in some areas. You have to pay for internet services anyway so the cost of the internet is really not an expense of your TV service.

First you need to get a TV antenna that has sufficient strength to bring in the local channels and an array of other channels. There are good antennas that are effective up to 100 miles from the source for less than $100. I purchased an antenna shaped like a flying saucer for $89 and it does fine for us. We are forty miles from most of the transmission towers in Phoenix. We get all the network stations NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, and about thirty five other channels. If you have Dish or Direct TV you can just disconnect the cables that go to the satellite dish and use a connector or splitter to connect the antenna to those cables and you will not need to string any cables within your home.

Next you need to purchase a Roku at Walmart, Amazon, or other sources. A standard Roku costs about $25. If you have two TV’s you would need a separate Roku for each TV. The new TV’s have Roku built in so in that case you could not need to purchase the Roku. With Roku you get some free channels and movies. You are able to get Netflix and Amazon Prime using the Roku if you subscribe to those services. Netflix costs $12.99 a month and Amazon Prime comes with an Amazon Prime membership which costs $120 a year. Those two add ons provide a lot of entertainment. I also have MLB which costs $120 a year for all of the in market major league baseball games during the baseball season. In addition we have Sling TV which offers about fifty channels which includes Fox News , CNN, and MSNBC. By going into Sling, I can change my package from Orange to Blue as many times as I want and then get all of the ESPN channels. But when I change to the line up for ESPN , I lose the line up that has Fox News, so I change it back to the line up that includes Fox News when I am through watching a sporting event on ESPN.

You ask what does all this cost. I do not think you would include the cost of antenna because they charge $100 for installation for cable services so that is what you would spend on the antenna. Sling TV $40, Netflix $12.99, Prime TV $10, or $63 a month and a one time charge of $25 for the Roku. Wow what a savings $62 a month. The Roku operates off of your internet service so that is why you need unlimited usage. Also there are other choices on Roku that are free and have free channels and movies. One of those choices with many channels is Pluto. If you want MLB it would cost you the equivalent of $10 a month additional. None of the services we have involve a contract that requires you to keep the service for two years like Dish and Direct TV require.

Good luck in cutting your entertainment costs during these difficult times.