Jersey Mike

I’m in love.

My relationship with Cable has been volatile for years. Back in the early turn-of-the-century, things were mostly fine. There were sixty or seventy channels, predictable programming, moderately affordable rates and I was still able to steal cable relatively easily.

We were comfortable.

I guess it was when things started getting digital when Cable became more high maintenance and needy. There was more offered, sure, but she got more expensive. Suddenly, our cute one bedroom with a twenty seven inch Magnavox just wasn’t good enough. The neighbors all got flat screens and some fancy new thing called “on demand”.

And demanding she got.

Needless to say, the past few years with Cable haven’t been the most enjoyable. Yes, there are literally thousands of television shows, movies, classic films and documentaries available “on demand”, but for some reason, I feel like I rarely get the true value of the nearly two hundred dollars per month I spend on my package.

Increasingly frustrated, I tried to give her more. HBO? Sure! I’ll watch Boardwalk Empire and Sopranos reruns. You want me to have a landline phone again also? Well, let’s do the “Triple Play” and fold high speed internet into it too. What’s that, baby? It’s gonna be almost two hundred a month with taxes and fees? Anything for you, baby.

The more Cable wanted, the less I seemed to get. My channel surfing had dwindled to Seinfeld on basic cable, Boardwalk Empire on HBO and marathons of Man Vs Food and No Reservations.

The land line phone? I get more wrong number calls looking for a woman named Esmerelda than I’d like to admit answering.

And the internet? Well, the way out of this dead-on-the-vine relationship seems to lie right within it.

I don’t remember exactly when or where I first heard of Roku, but it couldn’t have been more than five or six months ago. The best way I can describe Roku is “a way out”.

At the core of it, Roku is a tiny little box that hooks up to your TV and finds your wireless network and streams video content from The Internet. Much of it is free, but the good stuff, obviously, costs money. But not much. And certainly not nearly as much as my monthly Cable bill.

The box itself (I got the Roku 2 XD) is tiny and weighs practically nothing. It’s currently snuggled up next to my big, clunky cable box on the shelf beneath my TV. The user manual (which is entertaining in and of itself with it’s clever writing) says that, even with the box perpetually powered on (there’s no “on/off” button), it still uses LESS energy than a nightlight. Setup is as easy as plugging my iPod into my laptop and the actual activation practically handles itself.

And then the fun begins. Right now, I’m watching an episode of Family Guy. (Sure, I know, I can do that on Fox). But right before this, I surfed to a film produced by CBS showing Jackie Kennedy giving a tour of the White House on the Archive.org channel. Before that, I watched an episode of the J Report on the Jewish Channel (yup. they have one of those). And earlier tonight, I watched only the good clips from this weekend’s Saturday Night Live (The Devil talking about Penn State? Hysterical.)

The interface of this thing might not be as slick as your standard on-demand menu. In fact, it sort of makes me think of a hotel room on demand system. There’s a channel store where you pick out the content you want at your fingertips and it displays sort of like the album cover scroll view in iTunes.

But the magic is in the savings. Once you get used to the change (it doesn’t take long to get used to watching exactly what you want to, exactly when you want to), it becomes pretty apparent that the days of traditional Cable television may be numbered. As I mentioned earlier, I’m paying almost two hundred bucks a month for what’s really a sub par service. And with Roku, I get what I want, when I want it and for almost nothing at all.

The box itself costs eighty bucks. (There’s a cheaper model, but I went for the middle option). And beyond that, the only costs are the subscriptions. With both Hulu Plus and Netflix at $7.99 a month, I’ve got probably just as many options as I have on my Cable plan…but without all of the extra bullshit. (Actually ,the bullshit is there too, but I don’t feel as bad about it because I’m not PAYING for it)

Now yes, I do still need internet. And that’s going to run about sixty bucks a month. For local programming, the Over The Air converters are free and I hear the quality of the signal for the local affiliate channels is more than sufficient. But to break these chains of love with Comcast, there’s only one way out.

It’s Roku.

(PS – I just changed the channel…with the $0.99 app I installed on my iPhone.)

(PPS- I just found that the “channel store” is only the beginning…there are also thousands of user-created “private” channels out there as well)