I knew my contract from Dish was coming up and with my Hopper 3 not really living up to the hype I decided to start looking at streaming options and local OTA TV. I don’t really watch a lot of TV and being a father of 2 young boys I almost never get to watch live TV. The Hopper 3 with Auto-Hop was a nice idea but seems like every few month since release the time between a show airing and the feature being active was getting longer and longer. Some shows don’t enable Auto-Hop until the next episode airs making it nice for catching up but not a killer feature like it was when it released. Also DISH just raised prices for my February bill and it doesn’t sound like much but the $9 increase was the final straw. They didn’t add any channels and with other features lacking it was time to stop paying for the increases.

Lets take a look at my bill and programming with an explanation why the package I have is what I need for certain channels that carry the shows I do watch on a regular basis. First we have the locals which just increased from free to paid about a year ago. They did lower package prices but not the amount they increased the locals. They also somewhere along the way removed the auto-pay discount from what I can tell on the bill. At the time of this post my locals are $12 a month, that is for 7 channels. I get the major affiliates CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox. I also get PBS, ion and CW but the CW is NOT in HD. I also do not get all of the sub channels that are available if I got them OTA. In my area that adds up to about 12 more channels with at least two of them being 24/7 weather which can be nice but not a huge add-on in my opinion. That totals $1.71 per channel for my locals. I don’t watch them during the day since I work and don’t care for Soap Operas and the other talk shows and things that are on. I pretty much only need them for the major network prime time shows.

Moving on to their Core package next is America’s Top 200 for $77.99. The reason for staying at this package level for me comes down to really only needing a few channels. I am a fan of Doctor who and a few other series on BBC America and you guessed it, it’s only offered in the top 200. I also have 2 toddlers and Disney Jr. or Nick Jr. are on more than other channel in the evenings while the kids play in the living room after dinner. Both of these are again only offered in the Top 200 package. I did start looking at the Flex Pack which is $34.99 a month. I would lose BBCA and from what I saw there was no Add-On packages that contain it. I also lose ESPN and would have to re-add it. The Flax Pack plus the required add-ons puts me back up to $70.99 since I would want the Kids pack $10, the National Action pack $10 and the Regional Action pack $10 and the wife wants her Lifetime Movie Network in the Variety pack for $6. Even doing that I have a few other channels that are completely gone. So that lays out a list of must have channels for us. There are some compromises like LMN and BBCA I figured I could switch and use the annual savings to invest in just buying the series on Google Play or Apple iTunes. All in all because of mostly sports and some other events I can only save about $7 to $17 a month. It was a good start but I wouldn’t mind paying $70 or so a month for programming no matter what the service. I am also going to not really talk about HBO since that is the same price across all services but will mention it since it adds to the overall cost. I generally cancel it until Game of Thrones and Westworld are running new episodes.

Here is the real reason I am cutting the cord. Hardware fees. Paying $36 a month for 4 TVs and the whole home DVR is a joke. $15 for the main Hooper DVR service and then $7 per Joey. That isn’t even all of the TVs in the house I have 2 TVs without service that only stream or have a gaming console on them. I can’t even sit down in my office and fire something up for background noise without paying more to Dish. One of my biggest hang ups is that these fees get me nothing. I can see the DVR service fee possibly since TiVo is about the same monthly price for the features offered. That still leaves $21 a month that I can re-invest into permanent hardware such as Roku or Fire TV devices to accommodate my streaming needs. Having $252 a year buys a lot hardware. I have 7 TVs in my house of which all but 2 are Smart TVs. I also have a FireTV, a Chromecast, 2 FireTV Sticks and some game consoles. When I looked at streaming services I am pretty well covered and might not have to purchase anything new when I make the switch.

That got a lot longer than thought it was going to be so here is the TL;DR. My Dish bill is $141.02 a month or $1692.24 a year. That is just Dish and doesn’t cover any of the other services I have already such as Netflix or Amazon Prime that will cover in another post. My main goal at the start of this was to reduce that by at least $45 a month which cuts out all hardware fees and gets them back into my pocket to buy new gadgets to accommodate cord cutting, such as buying a new antenna for the OTA reception. Plus who wouldn’t like an Extra $540 a year. That is a lot of date nights with the wife.