In an effort to lower our monthly bills we ended up canceling our cable television service.  After an excruciating 30 minute phone call to Cablevision (which I don’t feel like getting into) we finally just have cable internet service through them.  I returned our cable boxes and remotes and our bill has been reduced by $80.  I also ended up cancelling our TiVo service – though the year was already paid for.  Besides the goal of lower our bills, we’ve also just been watching television in a different way lately.  The shows we enjoy the most can be seen through hulu.com, nbc.com or via iTunes.

We also recently got the cheapest Netflix plans there is which I upgraded to the next lowest today in order to be able to stream movies to our Xbox via the New Xbox Experience (which I got into the preview of this week).  We just watched King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and the quality was great.

Hulu.com and NBC.com cost nothing and get us access to a number of current shows and some of their past seasons.  We can use iTunes to purchase anything else we want to watch (nothing currently).  Netflix is $9 a month for the plan we’re on ($118 for the year) and gets us access to any new movies that come out which we can either stream or get the DVD of.  So dumping cable saves us about $840 a year after all the math.

I’ve been thinking about trying a service for video games similar to Netflix.  I recently bought Dead Space and was really disappointed with the game.  I brought it to GameStop to see how much the trade-in value was – $23.  A $60 game will be bought back at $23 and then sold Used for $55.  What a rip-off!  I become less and less of a fan of GameStop every time I go there.  I also wonder about the affect used game sales have on the video game industry.  I know there’s GameFly and GameSwap but I need to get over my need to own video games.  Maybe it’s worth going through my shelf of video games and thinking about which ones I wish I had rented and which ones I’m glad I own.

There are also similar services for programming books, mainly O’Reilly’s Safari site.  I looked into their plans again tonight after seeing an announcement for a Head First Rails book in “rough draft” format.  Unfortunately I found their advertisements and plans very misleading and just ended up canceling the account.  I may just purchase the book/pdf/draft option of the book and skip the whole Safari subscription.