After talking about it for seemingly eons, we finally snipped the umbilical cord and cancelled all our Rogers services. We switched to TekSavvy for our phone and internet, and we’ve bought a couple of digital antennas for the TV. The initial outlay for the switch is expensive, but we will save so much money each month, it’s very worth it.

I don’t know about you, but we end up only watching a couple of channels when we manage to turn on the TV. Mark and I have a nightly Peter Mansbridge ritual at 10pm, and Callum likes to watch TVO in the afternoons while Oliver is at school. So we still get these channels with the (modern) rabbit ears.

The older kids are missing Teletoon and YTV, but thankfully both of those channels have decent websites with full-length episodes of many of their shows. I have my Blackberry Playbook set up with an app that makes it easy to access web streaming, and an HDMI cable attached to the main TV. It works really great for those cartoons they are missing. I also found a site called Crackle last night that has some interesting old movies and TV shows free to view.

The kids are also really into movies right now. I’ve bought them a few extra for Christmas, including Home Alone and Home Alone 2 on Blu-ray  We recently received a review copy of Ice Age: Continental Drift and they loved that – it comes out December 11 and will be great if you need a last-minute gift for any kids in your life. Older Ice Age movies on Blu-ray that I just bought from Amazon will be wrapped up as gifts under the tree.

Unfortunately there aren’t many apps for the Playbook other than ones that just organize web streaming. We don’t have Apple TV or a Roku or anything like that. Should we get one?

I know lots of people have Netflix Canada accounts. This would be an appropriate time for me to sign up. However, an interaction with their PR agency last week left a completely bad taste in my mouth, and I feel like I don’t even want to register at all. Oh look, here I am giving them free publicity, just like they wanted, except now I don’t even have to organize that giveaway with nothing in it for me, not even a discount for registering or anything. Sorry, did I say that out loud? I guess I’ll get over it eventually and probably sign up only because we have no decent alternatives in this country. We have an old Nintendo Wii and I think I can access Netflix on there.

I’m not a downloader, legal or illegal. I’ve just never really done it and I don’t really even know how. I’m not at a point where I want to watch much stuff on my computer or tablet itself, rather than on the TV, and to be honest, I don’t have a lot of time for a lot of TV like I used to. I do miss hours of my life wasted on the couch, channel surfing, or even using it as background noise before the kids hijacked it.The good ol’ days. Those were fun.

The idea of having work for TV, in order to kind of sort of (but not really) get it for free is appealing to this coupon clipper. Have you cut your cable? Is that working out for you?

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