On the L33t Tech News podcast this past week we spoke briefly about cable companies and the problems they face with the movement of digital content into the living room through other means. It’s simply getting a lot easier to live without cable television.

I’m pretty sure I’m about to venture off and try to experience that first hand after I got my cable bill today: $150.

Let me repeat. $150. Preposterous.

Granted, I have cable and Internet on the bill, but you subtract the Internet and it’s still $115 dollars. A month. For what?

I watch maybe five channels regularly, yet I get a few hundred. Despite the ever forthcoming promises that a la carte programming, the cable companies still do not allow you to pick and chose what you want – which is ridiculous. Do I want Spike and the Weather channel? No. But I need to take them if I also want ESPN and the History Channel.

I was thinking about it today, what do I really need cable for? I like sports, so that is basically all I watch live. Everything else I record on a DVR (which I don’t currently have), but I do that more out of convenience than anything else. Pretty much all the shows I want to see are now online in one form or another. And a lot are free on sites such as Hulu.

With HBO now finally putting its content on iTunes, I think I’m done. For the $150 a month I pay the cable company I could buy an Apple TV and a ton of content for it in just two months. In six months, with the money I’d be saving by not having cable, I could add the Netflix Roku box and buy everything I could ever want on Apple TV and Xbox Live’s marketplace as well.

In a year’s time I would be saving so much money. I’d miss some things, but there is plenty of stuff to occupy my free time already. I hardly watch television as it is.

I might not even mind getting ripped off that much if cable actually made the presentation halfway decent. Instead I have an awful cable box that is not only incredibly slow, but has a horrible UI to boot.

Last year I wondered if 2008 would be the year that companies like Apple, Sony and Microsoft moving into the living room would force the cable companies to get their acts together and start caring about the product they are putting out there – kind of like how Apple’s iPhone and just the fear of Google has transformed the mobile phone industry in this country in a very short amount of time. All of a sudden we have talk of “open” networks and cool phones and unlimited data plans for cheaper than regular plans used to be. For cable television, that transformation hasn’t happened yet.

It’s pathetic. And expensive. I’d much rather pay for quality and programs I know I want to watch.

The public at large is still far away from jumping ship, but the cable companies would be foolish if they think that will never happen with the way things are going. Apple has already made the Apple TV pretty compelling, a few more features such as a DVR and we may see more people take the cable-less path.

I remember when my cable bill was $60 for cable and Internet in college. Now it’s $150 for the exact same service. I was in college in 2004, not 1954, that rate of inflation is ridiculous.

For too long I’ve been saying, “I wish I knew how to quit you, cable.” I’m just scared. I’ve lived so long with it. But enough is enough.