About a month ago I received a letter from my cable company thanking me for my loyalty and reminding me that my two year contract was about to expire. The letter informed me that I was going to get a 'customer appreciation discount' of $24.00 off my monthly bill. At first, I just assumed that it would be taken off my regular bill, but decided to call the company, just to be sure.
Boy, am I glad I did.
The first time I called I was told that my contract contained a special discount, and that after my 'discount' was applied, my cable bill was going to increase by nearly $80.00 a month. I asked if I was going to get any additional programs for that price increase. Nope, and I should be grateful they gave me such a deal for the past two years! I asked precisely when my contract was up and said I would get back to them.
At that time, I was paying nearly $160.00 a month for high speed internet and the middle tier of Cable TV programming. I really only had a few of those 100's of channels as ones I regularly watched, so I immediately began looking into alternatives. Did the lowest tier offer my favorite channels? NO. OK, check out the alternatives to Cable. I already had bad experiences with AT&T and Dish Network, but it turns out those are my only choices for my location.
Next I considered cutting cable TV altogether. About a year ago, I bought a PS3, which conveniently lets me connect to the internet through my TV. I then researched external antennas, and found a nice HD one that claimed to allow me to receive 38 channels of HD free broadcast TV.
I did a little more calling around and decided that my current cable company still provided the best internet service, so my final decision was to drop cable TV service and just keep the internet.
That was made final this morning. The HD antenna was something of a disappointment; after doing the set up scan, only 9 channels were available, but the majority of them were PBS channels, so I have no complaints. I've been consuming my news and weather nearly exclusively on the internet for some years, now, so there's no major change there.
Getting back to the PS3 and my now somewhat 'smart' TV. I subscribed to Hulu Plus, which has a lot of Anime, which is very popular with the whole family, and it, too comes in amazingly sharp HD.
Cutting cable is not a new trend, but it is becoming more popular. The trouble with Cable TV is that, in addition to the yearly cost increase, the industry hasn't really offered anything new. In fact, I considered cable to be a huge wasteland of uninteresting programming or channels that have changed greatly since I began watching them. The Weather Channel is one example. Instead of science, they have climate deniers, and that really upset me. They didn't even leave room for debate; the talking heads were surveying a bunch of destroyed homes and flat out denying that climate change had anything to do with it.
I'm also glad to be no longer subsidizing Fox 'News' or the 700 Club, which as far as I'm concerned is propaganda and hate TV. I suspect that in a decade, Cable TV will either be no more altogether, or will be an antiquated service that caters only to those who don't keep up with technology. That's not the way I would run a business, but what do I know, I'm just a former Cable customer!