I had finally had enough. At the beginning of 2012 my cable provider (Comcast) raised my cable TV rates and added a $10 “technology fee” on top of what was already becoming an outrageous monthly expense. And I don’t watch enough TV to justify $120/month, which if invested at 7% over the next 15 years could likely be enough to send one of my kids to college.

So I called and cancelled. And much to my surprise, they didn’t fight it. There was no retention specialist or anyone pitching me a three month sweet deal (which I wouldn’t have taken anyway). They just let me go. And I was happy about it.

I had been planning how I would do this for some time, and I want to share my experience with you because the cable companies are ripping everyone off.  Unless you must watch every reality TV show on the day it airs (and this solution may still allow you to do that), or you consume a lot of live sports (you can do a lot of that too), or have to see the premium channel content (HBO, Showtime) on the season it airs (this is the only one that bothers me), this plan very well could work for you.  This is the future of TV and it is much less expensive and easier to implement than you might think. Are you ready?

Let’s begin.

Get an HD TV antenna.

This is the dirty little secret the cable companies don’t want you to know.  There are a ton of HD TV signals broadcast right now in your house.  You likely just don’t have a way to pick them up.

Enter the HD antenna.  Once an expensive item to own can now be had for $30-$40 and they work really well; at least in my house near the Atlanta area.  I’ve highlighted two of them here.  I purchased the Terk antenna and my TV instantly found 51 channels, twenty of which are viewable and ten of which I will actually probably watch – those being the major network broadcasts and a few ancillary ones. But it’s plenty for me.

You won’t know until you try.  Where you live is a huge factor but you can check www.antennaweb.org to find out how far you are from a broadcast tower and determine what direction to face your antenna.

I was blown away.  You may be too.  The quality is fantastic, in some cases better than my clunky HD cable box, and it only goes out when the weather is bad.  That’s really the only downside.  Give it a try.

Get a streaming device.

Once you have the HD antenna set up, you will need some on-demand content to supplement the live feeds.  Thanks to three key services right now – Netflix, Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime, you can get virtually all the TV shows and movies any normal personal could consume, and much more.  Each of these services cost about $7 a month for streaming content, so get all three for $21/month (1/5 of what I was paying for cable), which is what I did, and see if you really are missing anything.

There are many options for streaming devices.  The Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 are both amazing.  For $60 you can get a Roku, which is a super small but massively powerful device that can bring you all this content.  I have both of those and then added an LG Blu Ray player which offers Blu Ray playback plus connection to a DLNA server (which I’ll get to later). The cost is minimal for what you get and it’s a one time investment.

ANOTHER TIP: if you have a smartphone or tablet, check for apps from many of the major TV networks.  Many of them have apps, and stream their content, and they do it for free.  A simple HDMI connector can plug it right into your TV.

Get a networked attached hard drive.

Here’s a sleeper many people don’t know about.  Are you still using a gigantic hard drive to store your content and back up your files.  Does it connect to your router?  If you fall in that camp you’ll be jazzed as heck to learn that you can scoop up a networked hard drive from sizes ranging from 1TB-3TB for under $200. 

I didn’t even realize all the benefits when I bought one.  But these new ones have personal clouds built in and will stream music, photos and videos right to your aforementioned streaming device.  Have family visiting? Bring up all your photos in a nice slideshow right on your big screen.  Having a party?  Stream all your music right through your TV.  On the go? Some network hard drives, such as those from Western Digital even include mobile apps that connect to your drive (and your cloud) and let you access files from anywhere.  It’s amazing technology.  Please look into it.  You won’t be disappointed.

Upgrade your wireless router.

I upgraded my wireless router to the fastest one I could find.  Based on CNET tests and some research, I opted for the Cisco router you see here.  It’s blazing fast, the wireless coverage is amazing, and it’s throughput is other worldly to support a bunch of streaming devices throughout the house.  It’s not a requirement for any of this, but it can help significantly.