Cool gadget!

If you follow me on facebook, you know I haven't been blessed with too much time to craft. While I miss it and hope I get back at it soon.. I have been busy living life and having fun. After all, isn't that what summer is about?

This is partially what helped us decide it was finally time to give up something we have had for a really long time and something I have wanted to get rid of for quite a while due to rising costs. After lots of talking with hubby, calling around and realizing it was going to be silly to keep it.. we got rid of CABLE!!!

You see, we have had Verizon FIOS for the past two years since we moved to our current rental townhouse. It was the best deal at the time and we had issues with Comcast at our old place (mostly we were having cable quality issues that they were unable to resolved) and had switched to DirectTv but I was never totally satisfied with their service either. We had debated keeping them and maintaining our Verizon DSL when we moved here, but were told that wasn't an option that only Fios was.

Since then, we have grown tired of the expense of all the home services and decided it was just eating too much of our budget and even as current customers, just interest would cost us $80 per month.. and to keep phone, tv and internet was going to run us the same amount we pay now. Read: current/potentially loyal customers get screwed. EVERY. TIME.

Anyway... onto the COOL part. During the research process and kind of trying to really sell hubby on ditching cable I researched the heck out of streaming media devices. We knew if we were going to be happy getting rid of cable we would still need some kind of (easy/cheap) entertainment to replace it. After all, we do have TVs and still wanted to put them t use. My cousin had put a bug in hubby's ear about AppleTV.

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It seemed really cool but I wasn't ok with just looking at one thing and wanted to see what else was out there. This led me to quite a variety of streamers... but here is the one that caught my eye.

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I am not going to sit here and compare.. but I will tell you that this guy, the #Roku3 definitely seemed to fit our needs best. It has cool available apps and can stream #Huluplus and #netflix. An added bonus for me was the remote with a headphone jack. Hubby tends to want to watch TV long after I am ready for dreamland so this is a life saver!! He just plugs any headphones right in and boom (it does come with headphones included too..) he is ready to go. He was a little skeptical at first but, like me, has found some series we never knew of on Hulu so far. I am already plotting about getting an additional unit for our downstairs TV. They do have 3 other models that have various feature differences and although I love this model, we do not need the headphone jack downstairs, so I would probably go with a less expensive one. 

So anyway, that is one of the adventures we have begun this summer. Not your typical "adventure" per say, but one we are enjoying for sure and for WAY less than cable. We are now paying $30/mo for internet and about $13 for our subscriptions to huluplus and netflix. I'd say we win! :)

Does anyone else have a media streaming device instead of cable? Tell me about your experience. 

*disclaimer: I was not compensated in anyway for this post. It was our choice to make changes and through my own research and the reviews of others that we purchased the Roku at a big box retailer.*

(edit: I may do a post down the road on more specifics of the player but honestly havent had too much time to explore outside of Hulu and Netflix... but there is so much more!)