I’ve been opposed to having a TV in our home since we brought our G4 iMac home two years ago. Since it plays DVDs well, has crisp-sounding speakers (even at high volumes) and gives me a way to buy my favorite TV shows commercial free (iTunes), I felt like a TV would be superfluous.
The thing is, I started adding up our monthly expenditures on both iTunes downloads, Netflix and Hollywood Video rentals. You’re probably wondering why we use iTunes, Hollywood and Netflix. Well, every other month, my wife gets me hooked on some new show. First it was “Lost”, then “The Apprentice”, and now it’s “Alias”. The problem with Netflix is that it always takes too damn long for the next disc to ship and arrive, whereas with Hollywood Video I can literally drive five blocks and have the next disc in my hands within 10 minutes. And when you’ve just finished watching the last episode of the season, you don’t want to wait 3 days before finding out what happens next. My issue with iTunes is that with each downloaded show, I lose about 25MB of space on my hard drive. That adds up fairly quickly. So I started thinking, what do we actually spend on entertainment, and would cable TV make more sense?
So here’s what I calculated as our monthly spend on above said activities:
1. iTunes Downloads: 15 shows @ $1.99 = 29.85
2. Netflix Membership: 17.99/month
3. Hollywood Video Rentals: 10 DVDs @ $2.50 = 25
Grand Total: $72.84
Now, Comcast is currently offering a standard cable package for $45.69. That would get us Discovery Channel, The History Channel, Bloomberg, etc. So at first notice, it would appear that cable would be the more economical option, and would even include a better mix of entertainment choices. However, I have to add the cost of a new TV to the equation. Costco sells off-brand flat panels with extended warranties. I found a 27” LCD on their site for $599, which amounts to an additional $49.91 every month. So in reality, the cable/TV option would run me about $96 every month, or in other words, roughly a 24% increase in monthly entertainment expenses.
However, if we look out a bit farther into the future, and calculate the spend over 5 years, the cable/TV option would actually drop my monthly entertainment expenses over the long-term (assuming no drastic changes in pricing). If we spread the cost of the TV and monthly cable bills over the five years, my average monthly expenses would drop to $55.67, a 23% decrease. So although the initial expense of the TV is fairly steep, it might possibly help to shrink entertainment expenses over the next five years. Fancy that! Looks like I may be dusting off that Costco membership card after all.
