We recently signed up with a satellite service provider to get some home entertainment.  It has gotten ridiculously expensive to enjoy a night out at the theater with today’s astronomical prices for popcorn, soft drinks, tickets and candy.   For any given movie, we would easily spend close to $80 for a family of four to go see a movie and all too often our enjoyment of the film is interrupted by cell phones, screaming baby or talkative viewers.  This doesn’t even factor in the cost of gas to drive there and the hassle of waiting in line to get tickets so we just decided for in home entertainment for the next year or so.

Of course, the satellite service is pretty cool.  We signed up for some HD and premium movie channels and we’ve been quite happy with the service so far but there are some potential cascading expenses in our future.

With the satellite service, it is simply too easy and too convenient to use the Pay Per View feature to order up a movie or sporting event.  It just takes a click of the button!  Secondly, as our kids get older their viewing habits will likely change and we’re beginning to see how they each would like to watch their own shows.   This could lead to us having to purchase additional TVs and rent/buy additional receivers.   We lived 10 years without cable/satellite but now it almost seems like a necessity.  I’ll monitor our expenses closely to make sure they don’t get out of hand but this service may end up at the chopping block after our service contract is up.    We hope we timed it right; we expect all TVs stations to be broadcasting in HD by 2008 and with our off air antennae we were able to pick up about 20 HD channels before service so hopefully they’ll be more and we’ll be able to cancel this service.  In the meantime we’ll enjoy the show in the comfort of our home!