Glenn Sanford

Use PlayOn and Save $ on Cable Big Time

January 18th, 2009

I’ve had a Playstation 3 for a little over a year.  Shortly after I picked up a Samsung 1080p 63″ Plasma for our wall in the living room and wanted to play Blue Ray Discs on it for maximum resolution.

Shortly after that we signed up for Netflix which has a lot of Blue Ray disks and for the $18/month it seemed better then going down to the video store and finding out that movies that we wanted to watch were already checked out.

Netflix on the website talked about “Watch Instantly” but I don’t really like watching movies at my desk in the home office so I didn’t take advantage of the Watch Instantly option.  A couple of months ago it started to dawn on me that maybe I could watch the movies through my Playstation 3.  Well it turns out that Netflix isn’t compatible with Playstation 3, only the X-Box 360.  Not to be deterred I continued to look for other options.  Then I found PlayOn

http://www.themediamall.com/playon which claimed to work with Netflix.  I installed the 15 day trial and in addition to Netflix I discovered a whole new way to watch video on demand.

Essentially PlayOn installs into the background of one of your ‘s and then processes the video from numerous sources on demand from the Playstation3.  We have a wireless network so it then broadcasts the video to our Playstation 3 wirelessly and the Playstation 3 puts it to the Plasma.

Hulu is included with the PlayOn and once I signed up for a Hulu account I now have access to many of the latest episodes of tons of TV shows, movies ect with very limited commercial,  It’s awesome.  Looking at a lot of the redundant programming we had from Cable we have dropped all but limited basic cable and have saved around $80/month just by installing a $30 piece of software.  Of course you do need high speed internet to be able to watch all these shows on Demand, so we still have a $50 bill per month for internet with our provider Comcast, however we would have that anyway.

Now I just need to figure out how to be able to add to my “Watch Instantly Queue” on Netflix from my iPhone.

Filed under: Business 201