Just as a quick recap for those of you who may have just start following along, this week I’m sharing how we live on less. First I shared our mission and philosophy to live on less and then yesterday how we eat on less.
Today we’re moving right along to entertainment. I feel like we need some dramatic music, so here we go…
Okay, now we’re ready to move on.
Monday I shared briefly how we stay happily entertained without a TV or stereo. We use to have a TV, but it was on the fritz so we left it when we moved. But we still get to watch our favorite shows thanks to the amazing world of the world wide web.
I have to make a quick confession: we have two radios, but they’re just in our alarm clocks. Does that count?
photo by just Luh
We watch all of our television on Hulu or YouTube. We make personalized radio stations on Pandora. Rent movies from RedBox and make the most out of our library system.
There’s a variety of sources out there for your viewing and listening pleasure.
- Pandora & Last.fm
- Internet radio that you can customize to your taste. Few commercials, thumb up or down songs, plays songs based on your likes, dislikes, and musical style of those songs.
- A kind of radio that customizes music to your taste
- Lala
- First 25 songs are free
- You can listen to the full song before you buy
- Unlimited web page is $.10, download for $.79 and compatible with Windows Media Player & iTunes (but cheaper than iTunes!)
- RedBox
- A $1 dvd rental (even blue-ray rentals)
- Keep it for 24 hours for a buck…each day is $1 plus tax.
- Lots of movies, conveniently located at grocery stores, drugstores (Walgreens, etc), and even McDonald’s!
- Hulu & Fancast
- Free TV and (some) movies in high quality.
- Some shows have a few days (up to a week) delay.
- You Tube
- Mostly amatuer hilariousness.
- Lots of full-length Masterpiece Theater/period drama pieces.
- Full music videos from recording artists.
- Great place to watch movie trailers.
- Cancel the Cable (Your Guide to Free TV)
- I heard about this recently on NPR.
- Gives you directions on the different ways to get free TV at home: over the air (antennas, USB/HDTV tuners), internet tv (free, pay, internet TV devices), PC to TV, and more.
- As we don’t have cable I can’t vouch for the in’s and out’s of this site personally.
- Your Local Library
- Movies, Books, Music – all for free!
- Make use of interlibrary loan
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This is a great list of resources. Thanks so much for sharing it!
Love the tips for living on less. We also do not have cable and watch things on hulu and netflix. Netflix does cost about $9 a month. You get one movie in the mail at a time, so you could get the occassional movies you wanted (food, inc.), but it has a ton of movies and tv shows you can watch online like hulu. It has lots of kid stuff too, like “Mighty Machines” for Joey. You can do a week trial online if you want to check it out. I think it is well worth the $9.
I’ve been thinking about that too. Thanks for the reminder!
We gave up cable 3.5 years ago and we’ve never looked back!!
You are my favorite. And I like the music. That made me laugh…and I needed a laugh today for sure.
In our 7 years of marriage, my husband and I have only had cable for a few months (and that was because it was a free trial meant to get us hooked but made us realize how much garbage is out there on the TV). Now we have Netflix. We like getting a good movie in the mail and enjoy the selection they offer to put on our Roku box for the kids to watch occasionally. Our friends are always shocked to learn we don’t have cable or go out to see movies. We can’t imagine it any other way!
We are HUGE fans of our interlibarary loan system. We can get practically anything on DVD for us or the kids and it totally rocks. We cancelled cable about 6 months ago, but still pay a minor fee to have a DVR box and local channels in HD. With my husbands very demanding job, we don’t have much time to watch tv during the week, so we record things during the week and watch them on the weekend–not really a money saving tip, haha, but it is what we do. Every now and again I miss seeing Alton Brown or David Bromstad, but local channels and our DVR boxes for 15 bucks a month is good for us.
Heidi – Once I finally started using the interlibrary loan system in SD it was amazing. It was basically Blockbuster for free! The library here in Louisville though doesn’t have such a good movie collection, which is kind of a bummer but we’ll live.
Great tips. We haven’t had cable for a while now and I love it. But of course I love the internet to get my favorites.