First of all the cost of smart TV’s has declined a lot in recent years. I would recommend a smart TV if you do not already have one. As an example at Walmart they have several different brands to choose from. For example if you wanted a 55 inch Toshiba it is currently selling for $358, an RCA 55 inch is $298, a Visio sells for about $378. An Ensign TV sells for less than the name brands but the sound is not nearly as quality as the name brands, so I would recommend getting a name brand TV. I have a Toshiba smart TV and love it.

If you have Dish Satellite TV or Direct TV, you are probably paying about $140 a month for the 80 channel package and more than that if you have their largest package. We cancelled dish and went with a different set up and are saving a lot monthly.

The smart TV’s have a Roku built in so you do not need to buy one. If you do not have a smart TV and your TV has an extra HDMI input, then you can buy a Roku for about $30 at Amazon or Ebay. We subscribe to Sling which offers two packages having about 40 channels each. If you watch Fox News one package has that along with the other thirty plus channels. If you like the ESPN channels the other package has that. Each package costs $30 a month or if you have both of them it costs $50 a month. We have Netflix for movies. Also we have Amazon Prime so that entitles you to their Amazon Prime TV package which has lots of free movies and recent movies that can be rented on line. I have MLB TV which allows me to watch any MLB baseball game for the pre-season and regular season , plus the post season, for $129 a year.

We have an outside antenna that cost about $100 which provides us with the local channels at no cost. I just disconnected the Dish from the satellite dish and hooked the antenna to that coaxial cable. There were two TV’s connected to Dish and I now get the local channels on both TV’s. The only cost for those channels is the antenna. We get about 42 channels on the antenna among them, NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox local.

On the smart TV you have a choice of a number of AP’s that provide even more channels many of them free. For example there are over 100 free channels on Pluto TV. There are movies, and networks that only appear on Pluto TV. For example “The First” is a great network that Bill O’Reilly originated, he is on each week day on that network. I watch “I’m Right” that follows O’Reilly with Jessie Kelly, it is great. Following that is Buck Sexton that has conservative views, he also is the person that fills the time spot on the radio that Rush Limbaugh was on. All this is free on Pluto TV. You just need to go to the Ap’s on your smart TV and add it to the selection that will appear on you main screen.

If we add the cost of doing your family TV in this manner let’s see how much you can save. Let’s say you just choose the Orange Sling Package, that would be $30, Netflix is $12.95, Prime is about $12 a month(it costs about $139 paid annually). Allocating the cost of antenna over a year , it would cost less than $10 a month. So your monthly cost is now only less than $65 a month.