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Cutting The Cable
Last weekend we cancelled our cable.
You have to understand, having cable has always been very important for us. The housemmate & I have always been big media fans, and I grew up in an area where broadcast channels were very limited; cable TV meant actually being able to get the shows we wanted to watch. (For those reading this who're below a certain age, yes, there was a time when DVDs didn't exist and the internet didn't actually contain video. Shocking, I know.) It was a deal-breaker back when we were shopping for houses, and it very nearly did break the deal when our idiot realtor turned out to be unable to tell a cable line from a phone line.
But in recent years, we've been using our cable less and less. Between pre-emptions, schedule changes, and random outages, it got to the point where it was easier to wait for the DVDs than to try to keep up with a show on first run. (The final straw was probably Agents of SHIELD, where our cable was out, or half out, more often than not. I particularly liked the entire episode that came with no sound.) Add in the number of shows that are increasingly only available on streaming, and the ever-increasing price (percentage-wise, our cable has gone up more than any other utility since we've lived here), and even we finally decided that it just isn't worth the cost of cable to be able to veg at HGTV or the Food Network once every few weeks. We'd been meaning to cancel it for some while, but every time I psyched up to make the call, our internet flaked and I ended up calling about that instead.
I'll spare us all the rant about our last bill, and the many hours I spent on hold getting the charges that should never have been there removed. Suffice to say, by the time I'd fought through that, I was highly motivated to stop giving the company any more money than we absolutely had to. They're also our internet provider, so telling them to fsck off completely is sadly not an option. But I cancelled the cable, and the next day we went out and bought our own router/modem so we could send back their overpriced internet equipment, too. (Also something that's been on the to-do list for quite a while.)
This weekend, we got behind the entertainment center and disconnected all the stuff that we now no longer need. That was actually more traumatic than cancelling the service. Gone is the four-way splitter-booster, and all the coax leading to our various recording devices; they're strictly playback machines now, as we no longer have a signal they can accept. Gone is the cabling diagram that I was tempted to print out in color and frame, it was such a work of media-geek art. We still have the five-way switchbox and the RF modulator, of course ("RF modulator" is to be pronounced in a Marvin the Martian voice, always), and I left the "video stablilizer" (i.e. copy-protect descrambler) in sequence, because it's not hurting anything and taking it out might have been more trauma than I could handle in one go. It's not like we don't have video; I've long said that if civilization collapsed tomorrow but the power grid stayed up, we'd have enough stuff on VHS and DVD to watch for the rest of our lives. But not being able to flip on the TV and channel-surf is a heckuva change, even if we weren't actually doing it much of late.
At some point we will hook up the new TV, and there will probably be a streaming service or two. But for now, we are somehow soldiering on with only the massive video collection and the occasional thing on YouTube.
You have to understand, having cable has always been very important for us. The housemmate & I have always been big media fans, and I grew up in an area where broadcast channels were very limited; cable TV meant actually being able to get the shows we wanted to watch. (For those reading this who're below a certain age, yes, there was a time when DVDs didn't exist and the internet didn't actually contain video. Shocking, I know.) It was a deal-breaker back when we were shopping for houses, and it very nearly did break the deal when our idiot realtor turned out to be unable to tell a cable line from a phone line.
But in recent years, we've been using our cable less and less. Between pre-emptions, schedule changes, and random outages, it got to the point where it was easier to wait for the DVDs than to try to keep up with a show on first run. (The final straw was probably Agents of SHIELD, where our cable was out, or half out, more often than not. I particularly liked the entire episode that came with no sound.) Add in the number of shows that are increasingly only available on streaming, and the ever-increasing price (percentage-wise, our cable has gone up more than any other utility since we've lived here), and even we finally decided that it just isn't worth the cost of cable to be able to veg at HGTV or the Food Network once every few weeks. We'd been meaning to cancel it for some while, but every time I psyched up to make the call, our internet flaked and I ended up calling about that instead.
I'll spare us all the rant about our last bill, and the many hours I spent on hold getting the charges that should never have been there removed. Suffice to say, by the time I'd fought through that, I was highly motivated to stop giving the company any more money than we absolutely had to. They're also our internet provider, so telling them to fsck off completely is sadly not an option. But I cancelled the cable, and the next day we went out and bought our own router/modem so we could send back their overpriced internet equipment, too. (Also something that's been on the to-do list for quite a while.)
This weekend, we got behind the entertainment center and disconnected all the stuff that we now no longer need. That was actually more traumatic than cancelling the service. Gone is the four-way splitter-booster, and all the coax leading to our various recording devices; they're strictly playback machines now, as we no longer have a signal they can accept. Gone is the cabling diagram that I was tempted to print out in color and frame, it was such a work of media-geek art. We still have the five-way switchbox and the RF modulator, of course ("RF modulator" is to be pronounced in a Marvin the Martian voice, always), and I left the "video stablilizer" (i.e. copy-protect descrambler) in sequence, because it's not hurting anything and taking it out might have been more trauma than I could handle in one go. It's not like we don't have video; I've long said that if civilization collapsed tomorrow but the power grid stayed up, we'd have enough stuff on VHS and DVD to watch for the rest of our lives. But not being able to flip on the TV and channel-surf is a heckuva change, even if we weren't actually doing it much of late.
At some point we will hook up the new TV, and there will probably be a streaming service or two. But for now, we are somehow soldiering on with only the massive video collection and the occasional thing on YouTube.