Cancel Your Cable

These days there are many other alternative to cable tv and companies are losing cable subscribers by the thousands every day. Comcast reporting they lost 275,000 subscribers and Time Warner Cable says they lost 155,000 video subscribers for their latest quarter. More and more people are cutting the cord and getting rid of their once beloved cable tv.  Don't count out the cable companies they are in the business of making lots of money off of you.  Many cable companies have several streams of income like mobile services, internet services and entertainment.  Cable companies are getting more creative with their fees as well, Comcast as an example is charging a fee to a company called Level 3 Communications this company was hired by Netflix to bring content to its customers.  Netflix of course is an alternative to cable and is a threat to big cable so don't feel to sorry for those companies if they lose a few customers.  The point of all this is to know you do have choices available to you if you are feed up paying huge cable bills.

This is a great product, it brings together a tonne of internet content from free and legal sources to provide you with a great tv viewing experience.  Want to watch your favorite tv show no problem the boxee box will itemize all shows, movies and other content for you to easily choose from.  It will draw content from such websites as Hulu, all the major networks, CNN for news and Netflix for movies among others.

Apple TV is another alternative, it has several choices of programing including ABC, Fox, Disney, and BBC and you can purchase episode, music and movies from i-tunes very easy.  The Apple TV product is about half the price of a boxee box, however there is a reason for this.  Apple TV does not have all the content  of the boxee box and I found that some of the more popular programs were simply unavailable to view.  This is something to consider when choosing what alternative you want to go with.

This is another video box with similarities to Apple TV and the boxee box. It offers more choice than Apple TV and is a bit cheaper than the boxee box at around $130. The Roku streams a variety of Internet video and audio services, including Netflix, Amazon, and Pandora. It makes streaming internet content easy.  The Roku has just recently announced that you will be able to stream Hulu plus service on their box as well.

Netflix streams a great deal of tv shows and movies for a small price compared to cable.  Netflix charges about $9.99 per month and you get to try the first month for free just to see if you like it.  I currently use Netflix and got it for $7.99 on a promotion however  they have since increased their prices by a $1 which is still cheap.  You can stream Netflix on a Wii, X-box and of course on the products listed above.  Netflix is definitely worth the small monthly fee.

A big hurdle for some users outside the U.S. wanting to stream content from the internet with services like Hulu find it difficult to do. Have no fear you can still access Hulu from Canada or outside the U.S. with your boxee box or Roku. My recommendation is to go with a VPN or virtual private network with a U.S. based server. When you access the content via a VPN it will show that you are trying to access it with a US ip address and therefore you can view the content without a problem. There are free vpns however they are a bit slow, my suggestion would be to just spend the $5 or so a month and subscribe to a vpn.