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So... who has pulled the plug on cable?


Phil O'Keefe

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Posted

I don't watch much TV, but I have a rather extensive cable bundle that includes a bunch of TV channels as well as a home phone (that I've literally never used) and a reasonably fast 80/80 mbps Internet connection, all through FiOS. The main reason for the TV stuff is for entertainment for my wife, who currently watches a lot of TV... but she was talking to our daughters and they don't have cable - just Internet and Netflix and Hulu... and so now she wants to get rid of cable.

 

I have heard that many people are ditching cable, but I thought it might be interesting to see how many of you have... so... have you? Any regrets? Any advantages to doing so?

 

(Yes, this is a repeat of a thread I started earlier today... we apparently had a bit of a glitch and a bunch of SSS threads were accidentally deleted... :( )

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I got rid of my cable 20 or so years ago when the FCC made them separate the equipment rental from the service on the bill. My cable service was costing me about $9/month at the time (basic channels only, no movies or sports). They said that the price would go down for most users, mine went up to about $12/month, so I canceled. I get all the TV I can stand over the air. Plenty of dumb stuff to watch when I can't find anything better to do.

 

A few years ago I started collecting TiVos from the local Freecycle list. I have one that still has old enough software so that it will record without a subscription (you have to enter the time and channel manually) and I use a digital-to-analog converter as a front end for that. Good for those late night old movies. It's a good match for my nearly 30 year old Zenith TV. No 4K here.

 

And who cut the cable on the last few days' messages here?

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I quit cable years ago and went with satellite for a time. Continually rising prices and poorer service (and stupid channels) got me pretty tired that quickly. About 2 or 3 years ago, I finally found a high speed internet connection for my rural area, and ditched the pay TV completely.

 

I bought a huge old TV antenna and put the UHF section (which digital TV uses) into the attic. That is our only source of commercial TV. I don't watch it much at all, except This Old House and a couple others on public TV.

 

But with a good high speed connection, we went to Netflix and Hulu (total of about 16/month above the cost of internet) which we watch almost exclusively. Tried Amazon for a year, but it was poor both in programming and reliability. Hulu has some really great music documentaries, hundreds of them!

 

The very best part: No commercials. I've been spoiled; I can't stand to watch commercial TV any more. When travelling I don't even turn on the TV in the room because it is so obnoxious.

 

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I dropped cable about 7 years ago around the time digital TV transmission rule went into effect. In the years since this happened there are a bunch of broadcast networks that have emerged on the digital subchannels. Here in Orlando for example on 43.2 is getTV - owned by Sony. They play old movies mostly. But on Monday nights currently they play old variety and talk shows. Last night the played the the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. It had the Who, who seemed to me to be lip syncing to me - but then they destroyed plugged in equipment at the end of their set.

 

There are a variety of other channels like getTV. I watch a fair amount of YouTube on my TV via an HDMI cable also. I do watch MSNBC Morning Joe excerpts from MJ's website. And I have Netflix and Amazon Prime. I might like to get HBO for Bill Maher's show, but I'm not currently willing to pay $15 per month just to see his weekly show. I watch excerpts on YouTube.

 

All in all, I don't miss cable. I'm paying about $10 per month for Netflix, about $100 per year for Amazon Prime, and $68 per month for AT&T internet. Seems like someone would have to compare apples to apples to really know how much money is being saved.

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I ditched TV entirely in the late 1980s. Dropped the cable, did not hook up an antenna, and removed the antenna mast. I've never seen MASH, Seinfeld, Am. Idol, Simpsons, Cheers, Taxi, Sopranos, D.Housewives, Thrones, Anatomy, XFiles, Friends, Abbey, Office, Wire, Big Bang, House of Cards, 30 Rock, Sex/City, and so many that I hear referred to often. Of course this leaves me out of a lot of conversations ;).

 

I gigged on Cruise ships for 3 years in the late 1980s. At that time there was no TV on the ships, except movie reruns and in-house ads.

 

When I got off the ship, I reconnected the cable, but found I wasn't watching it. When I did, I had the feeling I should be doing something. So I did. In a couple of months I decided if we aren't watching it, why pay for it? So tell me, how is Johnny Carson doing on the Tonight Show? ;)

 

Instead of watching TV I learned my sixth and seventh instruments (wind synthesizer and guitar), learned to write aftermarket styles for Band-in-a-Box and started a mail-order turned Internet order business to sell them to musicians in over 100 countries, this involved learning how to run a business, learned to write HTML and I write and maintain two web sites ( http://www.nortonmusic.com and http://www.s-cats.com ), recorded/sequenced over 500 backing tracks for my duo (and counting), learned enough new songs to keep the duo competitive (this never ends), increased my knowledge in music theory & arranging, Plus I've read books and spent a lot of fun/quality time with Leilani.

 

I don't miss TV at all.

 

Full disclosure. We have the minimum Netflix one-DVD-at-a-time in the mail membership. Sometimes the DVD sits on the TV for weeks before we watch it, and it's the absolute only time the TV goes on (we live in a fringe area, and can't even get TV without an antenna).

 

I'm perfectly capable of hooking a TV antenna up, I was a Cable TV engineer for a few years while testing to see what it was like to be normal. I found that for me, normal is so overrated ;)

 

I firmly believe that not watching TV has led to more enjoyment and more enrichment of my life - of course YMMV

 

Insights and incites by Notes

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Posted

I'm with you there, Notes. For every hour I spend watching TV I probably spend 10 hours reading. For me it's no contest - almost any movie from a book is not as good as the book (assuming the book is good to begin with.) And even 'tho I am a bit of a movie fanatic, my personal canon of greatest movies doesn't hold a candle to my personal canon of greatest books.

 

But I may just be built for reading - to truly appreciate movies you have to be something of a multi-tasker which I am so very much not. If I watch closely, I don't listen. If I listen hard, my visual perception goes on standby. My daughter can listen to an audio of a soundtrack and say, "this is the part where they break into the White House", "this is the part where they're flying over the ocean before the bomb goes off" and so on - for a movie she's seen once. That's not my DNA side of things. But she is an English teacher, so there's my DNA. Whew! :)

 

This is something of a golden era for TV, 'tho. The quality of many of the non-network series is by all accounts up, way up - stuff like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, etc, etc. It's not the typical wasteland of the media world as it's been in so many decades. There's plenty of total garbage, of course - but I have to recognize the great improvement in certain quarters. But for me - I've read the five Game of Thrones books four times, but I can barely make it through a full episode of the TV series.

 

nat whilk ii

 

 

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Posted

I tend to read non-fiction books. Mostly with either a scientific or philosophical theme.

 

Probably because my profession deals in fantasy land (musician), a dose of fact is escapism ;)

 

Just finished "The Devil In White City" and just started "Swerve".

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Posted

 

A few years ago I started collecting TiVos from the local Freecycle list. I have one that still has old enough software so that it will record without a subscription (you have to enter the time and channel manually) and I use a digital-to-analog converter as a front end for that. Good for those late night old movies. It's a good match for my nearly 30 year old Zenith TV. No 4K here.

 

And who cut the cable on the last few days' messages here?

 

Clever.

 

And no idea. My summer photo thread got the axe again, and it takes too long to do that, so I'm not going to bother any more.

 

I have cable. I think about cutting it, but I do watch a lot of current stuff, including sports, and that makes it a little more challenging. I believe most cable companies do realize that sports are the main reason people still keep their cable, so I don't know how this will eventually all shake out, but I would like to dump cable at some point.

 

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I`m paying for a lot of channels I don`t watch. I could survive w/o TV but I think my wife would freak out so...

 

Honestly, I love Netflix and most of the stuff I find interesting is on YT as well. I like documentaries...

Posted

 

And who cut the cable on the last few days' messages here?

 

It was due to an unfortunate gardening accident...

 

One of the mods encountered a glitch while digging the spam weeds out, and accidentally wiped the first page of SSS. :(

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Posted
Okay. I definitely won't be posting anything labor-intensive here again then. That's the second time that thread got wiped within a short span of time.

 

Well, we've now made it so that only Admins can hard-delete threads, mods can soft-delete (which means we can get them back if something nasty happens). No admin has ever blown away a front page (knock on wood), so hopefully it won't happen again.

 

As to cable...I have the "Holy Trinity" of Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube. Even then, it's hard to find content worth watching and network TV is worse. I'm considering getting an antenna for over-the-air transmissions, but the only time I watch anything is while I'm having dinner (unless a movie is so good I watch it all the way to the end). Not a huge fan of TV in general...there's a reason they call it "programming."

 

 

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I think I haven't had cable TV my whole adult life (I'm 37). I watch plenty of Netflix and have several shows & movies on DVD, and I like rewatching things that I'm into. So I'm not a snooty "I don't watch TV" person, I just don't watch it until it's old enough to be on Netflix.

 

But I have the cheapest Comcast cable internet (without TV), which I think they don't even offer anymore. It's $40. Sometimes I want to increase my internet speed, but they would charge me for TV as well.

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I tried to get Comcast Internet without TV, and they wouldn't sell it to me. At the time TV would have added $600 + taxes per year to my Internet bill. That's half a guitar or a decent synth module!!! ;)

 

And I don't watch TV at all. Zero - zilch - nada - zip. That's not for everybody, but it works for me.

 

So I'm with ATT, but I'm so far away from the end of the fiber-optics that all I can get is DSL-Lite. That means even TED and YouTube buffer in the middle. Ah. but I live in almost paradise, so it's worth it.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

Posted

I really don't watch TV very much, but I still need a fast internet pipe, so hopefully I can get FiOS without the cable, maybe add Hulu and Netflix to it, add a digital antenna (for local news) and live with that. My wife thinks it's a good idea, but OTOH, I wonder how she's going to like not having all the TV options she currently uses. Things may get ugly if she finds out she can't watch reruns of The Voice whenever she wants to anymore... ;)

 

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Posted
I really don't watch TV very much, but I still need a fast internet pipe, so hopefully I can get FiOS without the cable, maybe add Hulu and Netflix to it, add a digital antenna (for local news) and live with that.

 

I have the cheapest and slowest FiOS available, just Internet and phone, no TV. I have a bunch of discounts and it costs me only about $25/month. Download and upload speed run around 5 to 6 Mbps. I have an old Roku unit which is pretty glitchy when connected to my router via WiFi (it's going a pretty good distance), passable when connected with a Cat5 cable. Free programming with that service is pretty lame, with nothing I particularly wanted to watch, so I put it back in the box, saving it if I move to someplace where I can't get over-the-air TV.

 

They keep trying to sell me higher speed with TV for about $60/month more. Who needs that?

 

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Posted

Never had cable in my life. I do enjoy seeing its apparent downfall, but local sports coverage is something that has not yet escaped the realm of cable (and blackout rules prevent legal streaming of games). I hope that will change soon though.

Posted

 

I have the cheapest and slowest FiOS available, just Internet and phone, no TV. I have a bunch of discounts and it costs me only about $25/month. Download and upload speed run around 5 to 6 Mbps.

 

(snip)

 

They keep trying to sell me higher speed with TV for about $60/month more. Who needs that?

 

What I'd like is high speed (75 or 100mbps up and down) FiOS Internet like I currently have, with no TV and no phone. If I could get that for a hundred bucks a month, I'd be a happy camper. I think I'm currently paying closer to two fifty or three hundred. Even with the cost of adding Hulu and Netflix I'd cut my bill in half...

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Posted

There's only a few channels I watch on TV. I'd rather record a show on a DVR so I can skip all the commercials. The numbers of commercials they put in are ridiculous now. They play a show on for 12 minutes then stick in 6 or more minutes of commercials. (I can tell the minutes when I skip ahead.

 

I have Netflix but hardly watch it. 90% of the movies they list are really bad B or C movies and stuff that's so over played on regular Television.

 

About 2 weeks ago my boss turned me onto a box they're selling now. from what he says its better then Netflix or Hulu. It costs $50 and tyheres no subscription. Connects to your internet wirelessly and will scan the web for all the free video out there. He says he can get all the sports he wants, Movies, Series, local news you name it. I'm thinking about trying it out.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Amlogic-Android-Bluetooth-Quad-core-Streaming/dp/B01FQ5NQAY/ref=cm_sw_em_r_awd_d_5FHeybPE7RBE2_lm

 

I have this other subscription I bout that cost $2 for two years called Rabbit TV. Its all internet based and is supposed to help you find all the free shows out there but its got so much spam and dead end paths to pay shows, its hard to navigate to find allot of free shows. I use it occasionally on my cellphone but its such a hassle its not worth my time.

Posted
There's only a few channels I watch on TV. I'd rather record a show on a DVR so I can skip all the commercials. The numbers of commercials they put in are ridiculous now. They play a show on for 12 minutes then stick in 6 or more minutes of commercials.

 

My wife DVRs a bunch of stuff too for that very same reason - you can skip the commercials that way.

 

Many sites on the internet are just as bad, if not worse. You watch a 1 or 2 minute story, but only after watching a 30 second ad. Then as soon as the story's clip is over, they expect you to watch another 30 second clip before you can watch the next 60 second news story. It IS ridiculous.

 

 

About 2 weeks ago my boss turned me onto a box they're selling now. from what he says its better then Netflix or Hulu. It costs $50 and tyheres no subscription. Connects to your internet wirelessly and will scan the web for all the free video out there. He says he can get all the sports he wants, Movies, Series, local news you name it. I'm thinking about trying it out.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Amlogic-Android-Bluetooth-Quad-core-Streaming/dp/B01FQ5NQAY/ref=cm_sw_em_r_awd_d_5FHeybPE7RBE2_lm

 

 

Thanks for the tip - I'll look into that.

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Posted

I pulled the plug years ago. (comcast making me so mad I couldn't see helped with my decision) Anyway, now I only have netflix for my TV and get my news from the net and public radio. I don't miss commercial TV one bit except for Kentucky Derby or Super Bowl etc. but I can visit friends for events. Quite frankly, the ads were making me crazy, I can't do them anymore and needless to say, youtube is on my sh*tlist.

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