Cutting the Cord From Satellite

If you’ve ever had to look a satellite home entertainment bill in the face, you’ve probably had a thought or two about shredding it. We get it. Home entertainment is expensive, and the cost only seems to go up. Fortunately, there are alternatives, and we can sum them up under the banner of cord-cutting. The fact is that there’s plenty of room to cut costs when you cut the cord while keeping the home entertainment options that you value.

What Is “Cord Cutting”?

In a nutshell, cord-cutting is just canceling your satellite or cable subscription in favor of other ways to get the home entertainment content you want. The term comes from cable, where the cable is the cord you’re metaphorically cutting, but the idea applies easily to satellite television service.

You probably think you’ll need decent wired Internet service to make that work, but the reality may surprise you. There are options for people who don’t have access to broadband Internet or who want to forgo paying that bill, too.

Home Entertainment Over the Internet

If you want to use Internet streaming services, you’ll need a reasonably fast Internet connection. Most broadband will do the job. Mostly, faster connections will mean a faster experience. As 5G wireless technology rolls out, the experience should be smooth because the increased bandwidth will enable fast streaming of very high-quality content.

However, it won’t matter what the speed of the connection to your house is if your router’s building speed bumps. It’s worth making sure you’ve got a router that’s up to the job. The Asus AC1900 Dual Band Gigabit WiFi Router is a good choice. It’s rated at 1900 Mbps, which is plenty fast for streaming video and has several other features that provide a seamless viewing experience. But any router from a major manufacturer with a similar speed rating should do the trick.

Home Entertainment Over the Air

There is another way to cut the cord and still access the home entertainment you enjoy. TV antennas are hardly extinct. In fact, today’s UHF/VHF antennas will let you watch free HD content at a quality level that puts past devices to shame. They’re mainly low-cost and reliable, like the RCA Outdoor Yagi Satellite HD Antenna available on Amazon.

With an antenna installed, you’ll get traditional broadcast channels and maybe a few more, depending on where you live in most US, including ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and Fox, along with a chance at some other, smaller networks. Mostly, the setup is simple. You can plug the antenna into your TV’s built-in tuner and start watching. If your TV set doesn’t have a tuner, you can get an external one pretty inexpensively.

If you want to find out how many free stations you will get in your location, go to this website https://www.antennasdirect.com/transmitter-locator.html and type in your zip code will list all the channels you are likely to get. I think you will be impressed with how many channels are available these days. Of all the options, this is the one that potentially offers the most cost savings.

Streaming

The basic way to cut the cord is to move to stream services. That means subscribing to one or more services, streaming them over the Internet to your devices, and then using the streaming device to display the content on your TV or on the device itself.