I haven’t had a cable box since I was a senior in college, and despite not being able to keep 100% up to date with my favorite Food Network shows I consider it to be a fair trade for using Netflix. Not only does Netflix not have any commercials, but any show I want to watch that happens to not be on the streaming service I can most likely find hosted online somewhere for free – so tell me, if I can watch sports for free live at a bar, why bother paying for cable?
Answer: you probably shouldn’t, unless you’re a hermit who loves sports but hates being out in public. And if that’s not enough of a sway for you, Cord Cutting figured out how many hours of commercials Netflix saves you from having to watch every year:
From Nielsen, we know that a typical hour of cable television includes 15 minutes, 38 seconds – or 938 seconds – of commercials. Multiply that figure by 1.67 repeating and you get 1,563.3 (also repeating) seconds of commercials per day. That’s 570,616.7 seconds per year, which works out to 158.5 hours. So each subscriber saves him or herself about 160 hours of commercials per year by streaming their content through Netflix.(via)
For those not keeping track at home, that’s more than six days a year. Six days of your life you get back, just for getting Netflix – imagine what you could do with six days! You could go on vacation, go for a hike, eat at fancy restaurants or, most likely, plop your ass down on the couch and watch an additional six days’ worth of shows on Netflix.
Don’t lie – we both know that’s probably what’s going to happen.
[H/T Cord Cutting]