No More Movies

Posted By Paul

One thing I've noticed as the years go by is that I gain new pet peeves on an almost daily basis.

Okay, maybe not daily, but certainly things annoy me more than they used to, which I believe means I am right on schedule for 'grumpy old man' status some day.

But my point is that in the last few years it has become more and more difficult for me to go the movie theater. Why? I don't like the crowds, and more often than not I end up in a theater with a talker, loud food eater, etc.

So now I rarely go to see movies in the theater (maybe once or twice a year). Recently my wife and I went to the theater with some friends, and I was amazed at the prices. The tickets were up to $9.25 per person! Assuming my wife and I both go I'm looking at almost $20 for a movie!

The cost of a movie in a theater is getting crazy, especially considering that I was annoyed by Blockbuster online raising their monthly fee $2 per month.

So it turns out that my gradual grumpiness has paid off to the point where my wife and I have become "social movie goers" only. When it's just the two of us we just watch a DVD. We have a 14 year old TV, but the picture quality is good, and several years ago I bought a home theater speaker system (nothing fancy, but it's good), and for me and my wife we've noticed that once we got the decent sound system a DVD at home is even better than a trip to the theater.

Now when we watch a movie on DVD we don't have to deal with lines, crowds, and so on. We can watch the movie over dinner or a dish of ice cream (MUCH cheaper than buying the snacks at the theater), and our comfy couch beats any theater seat. Another bonus is that we can pause the movie if we want to get a snack, or need a bathroom break. Plus we've noticed that by the time a movie comes out on DVD we've often heard recommendations from people if it's good so we RARELY see a bad movie anymore.

When I tell people that I prefer to watch movies at home a common thing that I hear is that they can't wait for the movies to come out on DVD, they want to see them NOW in the theater. This was a problem for us for a while, but we discovered that after a while of staying away from the theater, all the movies we DIDN'T see in the theater started coming out on DVD, so now instead of looking forward to the new movies coming out in the theater, we look forward to the new movies coming out on DVD. If you can just suffer through that interval between a movie coming out in the theater and coming out on DVD, then you'll still have new stuff you want to see every week.

If you are one of those people who sees a lot of movies (like on average 4 or more a month) you might want to take a few months and do a quick tally of how much you actually spend on your movie outings (include things like parking, and snack bar trips). Assuming at least $7 per person per movie, it doesn't take long before the money spent on a simple home theater setup pays for itself (just don't put in your credit card).

Cost of Entertainment

Posted By Paul


I've been a member of Blockbuster Online for quite some time now. When Blockbuster launched the program the single disk program cost $9.99 and for that you could have one disk at a time and you could also take a mailed-to-you disk in to any Blockbuster store (there was one conveniently located to us) and trade it in for any in-store disk for free.


Since my wife and I like to watch movies at home this ended up being a great deal.


However, over the last few months Blockbuster has gradually changed their plan and prices. Now our plan costs $11.99 for the one disk plan and we can only exchange it in the store twice a month. This isn't a terrible plan, but it's starting to make me wonder if it's worth it.


Managing entertainment costs is something I try to keep an eye on since it's one of the most obvious ways to save a little money here and there. If the Blockbuster Online costs continue to rise I might just cancel my membership.



Is anyone else out there dealing with this?

Bye bye, cable TV!

Posted by Matt

I think I can finally safely report on the outcome of yet another decision we had to make when we moved into our new house (this won't be the last): namely, the decision of what to do with our cable television service.

In our old house, we subscribed to Comcast's "Expanded Basic" plan, meaning the networks and a few cable channels, but no pay channels or on-demand service. For that, we paid around $45 or $50 per month (after a discount for also subscribing to their Internet service). We have also subscribed to a 4-disc-at-a-time Netflix plan for $24 per month for over two years now and have been very happy with it. I got to the point where I couldn't stand to watch regular TV because the commercials were so intrusive.

So, I was making all of those exciting phone calls to transfer our services to the new house and I thought, why even bother with cable? The only show I was even still watching on TV was "The Office" and I was downloading them afterward anyway. My wife and I both zoned out occasionally to HGTV, but I knew I wouldn't miss that. So, I started exploring alternatives. Comcast was the only cable provider, but there was also the satellite providers DirecTV and Dish Network. The prices were roughly similar with only slight variations in the channel lineup and I dismissed them pretty quickly.

Next, I went out and actually bought an antenna. Yes, the old rabbit ears. I did a bit of research and found that our neighborhood was supposed to have pretty good reception. I talked to a sales rep at Best Buy who told me that the best models in the current generation of antennae have an internal signal amplifier, so I picked one up for about $30 (on-sale, of course). I was very excited when I first hooked it up; we picked up about 20 different HDTV channels and the reception and picture were amazing! Except for when they weren't. Every once in a while, we'd see large swatches of pixels wash across the screen, especially if anyone was walking around the house. One day, we inexplicably lost over half of the channels. We sadly decided to return the antenna. I think that if I were really into network television, I'd probably explore installing a roof antenna, although I suspect our HOA probably wouldn't allow it. No real loss.

The last televison service option I explored is still relatively new: FiOS TV. We decided to use Verizon for our Internet service in the new house to take advantage of their fast new fiber-optic network and learned that our TV could hook up to the same connection. Like the satellite providers, it was still pretty expensive and didn't really have anything that compelling.

So, where did that leave us? We rely totally on Netflix these days for all our television watching. We decided to take some of the money that we were spending on cable previously and bump ourselves up to the 6-disc plan for $35.99 per month. I'm not sure if we'll stay there, but we found that we would occasionally run out of things to watch on the 4 disc plan, mostly due to the weekend postal lag. This is less of a problem now that we are ordering more television shows, as they usually have more content per disc and last longer. Even if we stay with the 6 disc plan, it is still cheaper than cable, and I always feel like we have a lot of choices of things that we actually WANT to watch at home.

The only drawback so far is that our friends with cable aren't able to discuss the current season of shows with us, but that isn't a problem this year.

Just the disc service is adequate for me, but there are two more important features of Netflix I think are worth mentioning. The first is the "Watch Instantly" feature that lets us bypass the USPS and stream some titles directly to our computer screens. I use this for TV shows, because sitting in a chair in front of a computer for 2 hours to watch a movie can get tiresome (especially since I sit in front of a computer for 8 hours a day at work) and it doesn't really work well for more than one person. That does bring me to the second important feature, however: Netflix has announced that they are partnering with hardware manufacturers to bring the download service directly to our televisions.

The cable and satellite companies have resisted user-driven programming for far too long and Netflix is finally helping us achieve the ability to watch what we want, when we want. If you haven't yet, check them out.

Another new entertainment option from Amazon

Update 11/07/07: Please IGNORE the post below. I just went to purchase several Office episodes from Amazon Unbox, but changed my mind because the DRM will prevent me from viewing the episodes on my iPod. FOR SHAME, Amazon! I won't be downloading anything until further notice!

Posted by Matt

You may remember a post from me recently about downloading mp3s from Amazon. I was excited to find it at the time, but not as excited as I was today to find out that I can buy episodes of The Officeon Amazon now, too.

But, being the frugalizer that I am, I sat down to think, "Is this the most cost-effective way for me to watch this show?"

How much does it cost to watch each episode on broadcast television each week? To figure that out, I'd have to determine how much TV I watch each month, figure out what fraction of that is comprised of Office episodes and multiply by my monthly cable expense. But I'm going to skip the math because I've already watched the first three seasons on my iPod about a half dozen times and the amortized cost of each episode has got to be getting fairly competitive. Also, I'll probably be watching the episodes on TV regardless of whether I buy the episodes, so I think the more important decision is DVD vs. download.

It is only slightly more expensive to buy the entire season via subscription than to buy the DVD, with the benefit that you don't have to wait for the DVD release and you don't have to spend a lot of time ripping from the DVD to put the files onto your media player if that is where you want to store and watch them. And what dollar benefit can I assign to not having the DVDs taking up shelf space? Not sure, but it's a definite benefit for me.

To further rationalize it, my employer hands out recognition for good work in the form of Amazon gift certificates and I've got a few of those burning a hole in my digital "pocket". So, if you see me with my headphones on in the near future, chances are that my mind is on an inexpensive trip to Scranton, PA.