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One In Eight To Cut Cable and Satellite TV In 2010
r0k3t writes "It looks like people are finally getting sick of overpriced, ad-infested cable and satellite TV. I had predicted that by 2005 we would mostly be using the net for video — seems like I was a few years off. From the article: 'A cutting-the-cord trend has been the subject of speculation for some time, as networks have increasingly made television programming available for free on the Internet. But a combination of other factors, including a growing number of battles between cable companies and networks, soaring Internet video viewings, and an increase in connected TVs and devices, suggest the trend is finally upon us. ... The biggest reason why customers will cut the cord, according to the study, is the growing cost of pay-TV service. Cable and satellite viewers pay an average of $71 per month, and they receive an average annual price hike of 5%, according to research firm Centris.'"
How many of you have made the switch to Internet-only TV, or are considering it? Any regrets?
I gave up TV in 2003. Just use BBC iPlayer for the Doctor Who episodes now. Everything else is a combination of iTunes rentals, torrents and podcasts.
Jonathanjk.com
I made the switch in 2007, when I got my 24 inch iMac, and an EyeTV TV tuner. No regrets, really. Between Hulu and Netflix and OTA, I can watch pretty much everything I want.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I'm sick of overpriced, ad infested cable internet.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
There just is not the content out there worth paying the amounts they want.
The price set exceeds my demand.
Also 99% of it is crap.
Off the air for what I can get if it fits my time. Really don't even watch stuff off the net.
Not if the ISPs/Content providers have anything to do with it. Remember net neutrality?
Besides, you can expect the commercials to follow you regardless of how you get the content.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Seriously, who would seriously want to pay monthly for service you can just as easily get otherwise. TV + HD OTA Mac Mini + Internet (either streaming or download) XBox 360 + Netflix Mac Mini + Hulu Mac Mini + iTunes Best part is, it's wife-proof! We watch all the TV we want with substantially fewer commercials. I mean, a 30 second commercial interruption is far better than 5 minutes of commercial interruptions.
Why pay $71 per month when the ISS can be seen with the naked eye?
I will be leaving college in a year (or so) and my only hesitation to dishing the cable (bad joke I know) is the occasional football games and live news. Could this be supplemented by the internet - as in watching live ESPN or The Masters with some subscription service? I haven't really done much of any research here and do not really know my options; anyone have something that you particularly like? - Thanks
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
Sure, I miss not getting shows that friends talk about at work, but I have other ways. And with Hulu and Netflix, I rely on those other ways less and less, if at all. I want to pay for my content, but not everyone else's. Watching the fiasco's with Disney and ESPN (among others over the years), I was glad that I wasn't involved and getting suckered.
For me, it began over watching the Discovery Science channel. It was channel 101 and suddenly just out of my lineup range. I had been trying to explain to my father (who lived with me) science concepts, as he was opening up more and showing interest. The TV shows's imagery and hosts could often explain things better than I could, and I might learn something new as well. My free trial was over, and so I called Adelphia (now Comcast) up. They said that not only would I have to forsake my special rate of something like $35 for the next 6 months (I think I had it for a year total) I would have to pay for digital cable and also the first additional digital package. So, for 1 channel they wanted me to almost triple my bill to $95. My next words were, "Cut it off."
Unfortunately I still am dealing with them over Internet service, but maybe in time things will get better.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
We watch what we want OTA from the networks, and with the help of an OTA DVR (DTVPal DVR) we "tape" what we can, and use Hulu for the rest.
If you live in a city and invest in a decent antenna, you will get enough HDTV programming to cover your typical urge to just be a couch vegetable for a while. The internet and Netflix is a great supplement to this, leaving you with more to watch than ever before.
Never had anything other than Internet in the first place...
Sat and cable are too expensive, and I don't watch much anyway. Maybe someday I'll get a Slingbox or similar so I can do video-on-demand, but it's not a priority.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
"It looks like people are finally getting sick of overpriced, ad-infested cable and satellite TV. I had predicted that by 2005 we would mostly be using the net for video — seems like I was a few years off. From the article: 'A cutting-the-cord trend has been the subject of speculation for some time, as networks have increasingly made television programming available for free on the Internet.
So... why would I (or numerous others in similar situations) do this when we can get high speed Internet for $30 a month IF we spend another $30 on cable?
So, honestly, I could drop cable (and thus Internet) and then spend more than $60 a month to get Internet (of a similar speed) from someplace else? See why this article doesnt make sense? Nowadays with the cable/Internet bundling prices, people would simply revert to basic cable (ie: no HBO, SHO, etc) and keep their cheap-yet-decent-speed Internet.
After all, without that decent/high speed Internet connection, one cannot watch "online TV" - and for many that means keeping cable as well (and for a growing number, it means keeping Verizon's equivalent or paying a lot more for just Internet).
Now, as far as satellite goes... sure... I could see a bunch dropping that. My brother got satellite for a while... but it meant he had to pay extra to get Internet from someplace else, so, even though satellite at least offered more channels and somewhat better quality on a bunch, overall it wasnt worth it when getting a comparable Internet connection to the previous cable one (28Mb/7Mb) would cost quite a bunch. So, out went the satellite, back in went the cable.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
I know we are looking at cutting back the channels a bit. We wouldn't get rid of our dish entirely but do we really need HGTV and MTV? Going with the basic channels will save us $30/month approximately. Anything I miss I can probably find online somewhere if I really want it.
I switched, so you can do it too !
And I can tell you the variety is marbulous, wonderfull simply spoken great .. no ads .. no annoying persons in ads. I like the tv/movie-cloud
- No german talking guys.
- No persons who're desperatly trying to be famous
- it's wonderfull and I get untranslated, blunt british humor at no cost
But I miss the weather-report .. now I have to take a look outside the next day to decide if I'm wearing my pink raincoat or my knickers.
ps.
thanks to all the hardworking guys on sharedhosting-tv, you do a great job !
pps.
I'm starv'in for IT Crowd S4 and Caprica !
I sold my remaining TV about 5 years ago when I realized I had not even turned it on for many months. I don't miss it at all.
Anything worth watching is on the internet.
There are a few programs I like that are only on cable/sat: some of Comedy Central, Sy-Fy, History, and Discovery. I see those episodes on torrent sites the day after showing up on sat, but I pay for what I watch, so I keep my Dish. The problem is the 80% crap most people don't care about that is bundled with even the basic packages.
Ala carte channels would fix this, but that won't happen. Maybe individual program downloads if appropriately priced (say 25 cents for a Daily Show, or 50 cents for an episode of Caprica) would work. But I suspect the pricing will be more like $1 for an episode of the Daily Show *with* commercials and $4.99 for an episode of Caprica, so no dice there.
In the end, I guess the industry will price me out of watching even those few show and I will drop Dish and just stop watching. It does not have to be that way, but that is what the industry is choosing.
can't wean the wife and kids off the tube, but by the time we empty nest we'll be gone. Personally I watch only one show, never catch it live because the timeslot is inconvenient to my work schedule, so I have watched every episode online. I might miss live sports but I don't watch regular season games unless my teams are contenders. I'm betting that by the time I cut the cable, most pro sports will be available live with ads like tv episodes. Heads up to advertisers: I'm more likely to watch your ads when it's 30-60 seconds online than I do when it's 2-5 mins on TV and I can channel hop and get interested in something else or grab a snack in the kitchen, etc... In other words, if you think you're getting your money's worth on broadcast TV, then you'd definitely get more than twice the value from showing half the commercials online at twice the price.
When all of your wishes have been granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed - Marilyn Manson
I made the switch when I moved out last year, now I can barely stomach tv commercials at all. I tried to watch Lost on broadcast a couple weeks ago because didn't want to stay up late for it to be uploaded and had class in the morning, I couldn't make it halfway through.
I've been without cable or satellite TV for years. I watch DVDs, and lately have been watching most shows/movies with Netflix instant (or from the TV networks on the Internet). I've been getting by with a 6Mbps DSL line, but I'm getting ready to switch over to 25Mbps cable (internet only, no TV). At some point, I'll probably get a new TV, at which time I'll use an antenna for HDTV.
Free to Air Satellite offers a wide array of programming. The majority of that available in the United States is not in English and targets ethnic audiences. English language programming is available such as CCTV News (formerly CCTV-9), Al Jazeera English and RT (formerly Russia Today). There are also a variety of religious channels in many languages.
This should not be confused with the, often called, FTA that amounts to the unauthorized decryption of encrypted signals.
Ku band generally requires a dish less than 1m. C band generally requires a larger dish.
I've gotten by nicely on antenna tv and internet video for years now.
I catch my shows online, netflix for movies and t.v. for local news and background noise.
T.V. is mostly obsolete aside from watching movies.
I understand you can recycle satellite dishes to run long distance usb wi-fi.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I haven't had a TV in my house since 2001. I watched on my computer from the indie video store, later netflix, and now the net. Incidentally, since hulu et al., my TV viewership has gone way up. I do have a big monitor in front of the couch, now.
I honestly hadn't watched any TV until Battlestar Galactaca and Lost sucked me in.
Now there's Glee, Community, Dexter...the list goes on.
p.s. it means I'm cooler since I've been without a TV longer, right?
and other non-techies. I theory, there's no reason my kids and wife couldn't just pull up what they want to watch like a normal person and in fact they do - even my six year old watch cartoons online, movies off the wii, etc. But they're still used to the DJ-style background mix of cable, and with eight TVs there's no cohesive way to play "anything, even if it's crap" on all of them. Nor does there seem to be way to get "whatever is on" pandora style for TV - it's all on all the time, more choices then they'd like. They still also listen to terrestrial radio, even though there is sat and mp3 with everything on it, because they don't feel like getting stuck trying to pick and just want whatever is on.
December 2006 the Dutch government puled the plug on analog TV broadcasts, and I can't get cable here. The lack of anthing worth watching didn't help either.
The Discovery channels are like Wikipedia: they give you an overview so that if you're interested in a subject, you can drill down.
I pretty much stopped watching TV in 2002, when I moved to the US. Not only were the ads unbearable, but the shows I cared about were never on at the time I wanted to watch them.
At this point, I use various online services (sadly reliant on Flash) to watch the shows I want to watch. Unfortunately, many of them still contain ads-- I'd happily pay the providers to not interrupt their shows with that nonsense. Alas, certain shows (such as the new Doctor Who series) are not accessible in that fashion, so I will have to wait many months until they are released on DVD.
Of course, Doctor Who is available on (probably illegal) bittorrent, but I don't consider that an option (since I can't buy a UK TV licence, which I would be willing to do for that purpose.) I've e-mailed BBC America asking specifically to buy a licence to download their shows: `I give you money, you don't sure me for bittorrenting your stuff.' (Yes, it sounds a bit like protection money.) Unfortunately they never got back to me.
I find it unlikely that content providers have not realised the demand by people like me. I've heard rumours that iTunes sells TV shows these days; could it be that the majority of people are flocking to these proprietary platforms, preventing a truly open solution from manifesting?
But then how do you get that Internet access? If you cut your cable, you can't easily get cable Internet, and if you switch to a cell phone, you can't easily get DSL. Well, you can, but they charge you a "line fee" equal to the price of limited basic TV or basic telephone service. Nor can you get a video-grade Internet connection over the air. And if you try to get your Internet access by tethering your PC to your cell phone, the 5 GB per month cap will ensure that the only Netflix service you get is DVDs by mail, not Watch Instantly.
Are there any good TV shows? I've watched some Lost episodes when a hawt girl said she loved it, but mostly it's just an incremental improvement over that perpetual mystery garbage the X-Files popularized.
I'd say the last good TV show I saw was B5, although Buffy was alright if you skipped al the crap episodes. I'm sure there must be good one season shows like Earth 2 and American Gothic, but I've not noticed them.
I've mostly watched movies on the internet since I've been living in countries like Germany and France where movies are dubbed.. and England where the women are too fat to invite to a movie.
You know, every day some friend forwards me some really awesome youtube video. I also really liked the Daily Show when I remember it. etc.
I'm definitely not the future of television of course. lol I'd hazard a guess though more people are valuing those daily youtube clips more and more highly. I'll bet they notice when the available television shows just don't stand up to :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN0254u56Mc
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I haven't owned a TV since ~2006. I do watch it rarely when at friends' houses/flats, but I can't say I've missed it. If there's a show I really want to see, I generally watch it on my computer [sans commercials, etc]. I'd think that's not particularly unusual among /. readers.
Actually several lessons, none of which are likely to be learned. But the one I was thinking of is that you can't just rest on your laurels. The boom in cable took place in the 70s and 80s, and all the cable companies thought once they got the cable installed they would have a monopoly and wouldn't have to work again. The satellite companies rained on their parade, but the fact was they had that wire into everyone's house, and they didn't have to do very much to make money. Several times there were ideas floated about letting the customers buy services directly from the creators, paying the cable company a fee as a common carrier. The cable companies got that shot down, and went back to their comfortable life of doing almost nothing.
As ought to be clear by now, they had a huge, underutilized asset with a line into so many homes. They didn't care, as long as the money flowed in, but now they have been overtaken by events. The service that they offer is not only overpriced, but outmoded. Their network of cables will allow them to survive, but they ignored the new technology for many years and now they are paying the price.
I switched, so you can do it too !
If you cut your cable TV, from whom do you get high-speed Internet?
But I miss the weather-report
That's what Weather.gov and foreign counterparts are for. What you really might miss over the Internet is live sports.
At the risk of being "That Guy", I don't have a TV and I don't really have any plans of getting one. My old roommate just moved out, and the cable was in his name. I just ordered service (currently, I'm leaching Wifi... sucks), which despite the fact I have gear and am already wired, apparently they have to send someone to me or some crap. Point is, despite the fact they really wanted to bundle me TV and digital phone service (I have a cell phone, why do I need a 'land line', especially if it'll go down if the power is out?), I had no reason to bite.
I think that as younger generations come up and are the ones making these types of purchasing decisions, it's going to be more and more common to just "do without" "old people" entertainment. The few things I want on cable, I can get on Hulu, or on southparkstudios.com the day after the episode was on TV. I use the internet to keep in touch with my friends that don't live near by, group coordinate stuff with those who do, get my the news that I don't get off of NPR in the car, obtain my software updates, work on personal projects, and sometimes work from home. I don't really need TV and I don't want it. Hell, I think if my parents' generation realized that they can get the weather on the internet without having to weight until "the eights", they'd probably ditch cable, too.
Of course, that means that the service providers aren't going to let "network neutrality" ever happen, aren't going to stop doing stuff like DNS hijacking if they can get away with it, and advertisers are going to continue polluting the tubes. Why? 'Cause they have to make up the revenue somehow, and if we're not watching TV, they'll move to where we are.
As an aside, as someone who "doesn't watch TV" (and yet I don't shout it from the rooftops every chance I get) I always look forward to coming back to America, cracking open a beer, settling into an easy chair, and getting reacquainted with an old friend called "Television". I have about 24-48 hours of bliss before the shows start to repeat. After that, I just get kind of disgusted with the whole thing. I get even more disgusted with myself for turning on the TV even though I well know that there's nothing on. I suppose if I got into it I could use the DVR to record the shows I want, but without flipping the channels how will you discover more shows? There's also the fact that these Discovery channel type shows tend to use the same formula over and over again. I'm not even mentioning the gigantic noise machine that is advertising. Anyhow, I look forward to watching TV and I look forward even more to getting on the plane to return abroad and leave all the pandemonium behind.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I don't miss it one bit. Although, it does make it kinda boring when guests come over.
I think everyone here has his small old Linux home server running somewhere. ;)
So you can implement the following setup:
1. eztv.it has a feature to generate a RSS feed with torrents out of any TV show.
2. mldonkey is a headless edonkey/bittorrent/kad/overnet/etc client that can take rss feeds.
3. You need a small script, run via cron, to check for new entries in the feed, and add them to mldonkey. (The feature to integrate it is planned, but they need developers.)
4. mldonkey downloads the files, even while your main computer is off, and you are away or sleeping.
5. Configure it, to send you a e-mail when a file is done.
6. Use sshfs-fuse (or something else) to mount the server’s incoming directory to your main computer.
7. And best of all: Get a 3x2m projector and dolby digital 5.1 sound system, an play it trough them at the exact time you want to.
Of course any other headless torrent client will do too. (You could even use elinks, which has a torrent client and a text interface, which you could control with a bash script.
I have added all the shows I watch, and the episodes just pop up in my mail client. I have to do absolutely nothing. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
If it's an SDTV, I understand why you got rid of it. But if it's an HDTV, keep it: you can connect your PC's VGA out to the TV's VGA in or the PC's DVI out to the TV's HDMI in. This gives you a PC monitor that you and your friends can comfortably fit around.
So why is cable TV $70/mo and still ad-infested?
Because the same channels would be $300/mo without ads.
The only sucky part about Hulu is that sometimes, all they have are clips of certain shows or limited run time (Buffy the Vampire slayer).
If you Netflicks and Amazon, you can watch many shows that are on DVD - without ads.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Now, I'm a person who loves good TV. However, cable has never made sense for me, because I don't watch TV on a schedule. Even back when Firefly was on, if my girlfriend had amorous activities in mind, I would regretfully have to catch up on the missed episode later.
Up until recently, I was combining broadcast TV (I watched a lot of syndicated TV like the Simpsons and various sitcoms) with DVDs and the Internet. Then the government helpfully killed my TV, the digital box I bought (in part with YOUR TAX DOLLARS) never really worked well enough for me to use it. Currently, the only channel my TV picks up is the Nintendo Channel (my Xbox 360 is hooked to a computer monitor).
The only show I really make it a point to catch these days is Breaking Bad which I'm subscribed to through Amazon's Unbox (normally I'd wait for the DVD, but someone at work will spoil the episode for me if I don't watch it the morning after it airs.). By the way, I'm aware of the negatives of Amazon's Unbox service, but it works for my narrow use.
Now, of course, this is not to say I've never mooched off of anyone's cable, as my parents can attest, but since I've been moved out I've never gotten cable or satellite in my home.
Why would I when I can watch just about anything I want to whenever I want to on the Internet? I'm serious, it's rare I can't find somewhere to watch something online nowadays.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Interestingly everyone that comes over and sees the set-up wants it for themselves. It still takes *a little* geek savvy to install a system like this, but not for long. Once people get more exposure to this sort of thing they'll never look back.
It's much more enjoyable to watch TV-shows via Hulu/Netflix than it is once a week with long adverts, anyway.
People are cutting out non-essentials so they can get out of debt or simply be financially secure. An extra $71 on a $150K mortgage will cut years off the time it takes to pay it back and save thousands of dollars.
If we didn't get cable forced on us through our HOA (at $8 a month, a steal) we wouldn't have it. We have NetFlix and the internet for watching movies and shows. We're getting rid of our landline to save $25 a month that we don't need to be spending. We have MagicJack, Tracfones and a company provided cell-phone.
All the money we're saving is being snowballed onto debts which are quickly disappearing. Once we're out of debt then we can decide which luxuries we'd like to have.
Work Safe Porn
My family dropped cable TV service a couple of weeks ago. We're probably not typical, though. We never had cable TV until our kids got to be about 9 and 12, and then they said they really wanted it, so we got it. It was a novelty at first, but then they lost interest. Since we weren't watching more than an hour a month, we decided there was no need to keep paying the bill. I think flash games and internet chat take the place of TV for them. Rising prices were a contributing factor, but we probably would have stopped even if prices had stayed the same.
Find free books.
We haven't had cable in our house for 10+ years now. The local cable company, Charter, is really expensive and doesn't offer internet service. Our telco, CenturyTel, offers the only available internet (10Mbit DSL) but their TV offering is a partnership with Dish Network and that's a deal breaker.
Recently we found out we could watch NetFlix through our Wii for $9/month. We can watch a lot of the BBC programming we love and a ton of movies. The user has control over what and when they watch programming. Not everything is available for streaming but more and more seems to be added all the time. This is how cable should have been all along. Now if only the services of NetFlix and Hulu could be combined it would be perfect.
Don't think of it as a flame, more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage.
As soon as the Boxee Box comes out and I get some feedback on how the NHL center Ice package ($80/year) looks over a decent connection, I am dumping everything else.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
Yeah, I'm just not buying this.
Comcast, for one, added 599,000 video, high-speed internet, and voice subscribers in the first quarter of 2010 AND beat all of the analyst's predictions on profit. If this study were true, that wouldn't be the case.
Sources:
Comcast’s 1Q beats last year and analysts’ estimates
Highlights From CMCSA's Q1 Conference Call
I switched to Antenna + hulu almost 2 years ago. First it was a little more complicated to have shows load in hulu and use the media center for the other videos but now with hulu desktop, I have just mapped a button on my remote control to open up hulu desktop and that is 95% of my TV watching. I not even have the Antenna connected anymore (great picture quality) because hulu is so much nicer. It is like having a DVR that records almost everything. It will be interesting how it changes with hulu when you have to pair for some programming but at the moment a htpc and hulu desktop is a great combo.
and I associate TVs, cable and the like with the likes of Betamax, System 5, and floppy disks. Haven't owned or had easy access to a television since I went off to college when I was 18.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
One In Eight To Cut Cable and Satellite TV In 2010
I currently have AT&T U-Verse (having had Dish Network ... awesome service but I can't get it where I am now) and Comcast (blecch!) My current bill (not counting taxes, fees, etc.) is about $160/month. I dropped all the stupid movie channels (there's a vast wasteland for you) and went down to the mid-level tier on Internet speed (12 mbit/sec). I have one phone line, and two cable boxes (one is AT&T's DVR) and I pay the extra ten bucks for the high-definition channels (now that's a rip, so far as I'm concerned.) All in all, it's not a bad deal but all I really want is Internet and phone service. Unfortunately AT&T doesn't sell naked VDSL where I live, so I'm forced to buy the TV service. Comcast will sell just an Internet connection, but I don't want to go back to that schlock outfit. Ever.
Frankly, most of the movies we watch we get from Netflix. $16.95/month, never had a problem. in fact they actually lowered our fee a couple of times. I may just see if I can get basic DSL from SBC, along with a phone line, and survive on Netflix and broadcast TV. That would probably run me about $60-$70 per month, which would be a substantial savings. I could put the money towards a new motherboard.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I canceled cable TV to conserve money. Drawing on a limited technical background, I hooked up an old PC to an old TV using an el cheapo VGA2RCA adapter and discovered the joy of Internet TV and ripped DVD's. Downloaded a decent on-screen keyboard and magnifier program, and now I'm a complete bed vegetable. Cool.
Honestly our household has been cable-free since 1994, and when NTSC OTA ended we never bothered to buy a converter box. Honestly up until a few months ago my mom wasn't missing it much at . My dad has only bothered with TV to watch racing over at my grandmother's and only when there's actually something on (Speed went from having a very nice lineup of auto shows to showing only reruns from it's first 2-3 years on the air. Almost nothing new seems to show up on there except for the occasion current-season race, and like every other channel on cable, there's nothing to watch between say 1am and 6am in the morning, which at least for me had been a key viewing time for television to begin with.)
Honestly I'm a bit surprised that large swathes of the consumer demographic are coming to the same conclusion, but not at all surprised from a rational business perspective. The whole benefit of cable has been offset by the amount of advertising and 'non-core demographic programming' being passed off on niche channels. SciFi, Speed, and most of the other channels were supposed to cater to a reasonably narrow group of people. But rather than figuring out what that group wanted, and doing a better job pulling in viewership from that demographic they chose to 'dumb them down' and try and pull in viewship from other genres, thus alienating their original viewership while only pulling in people from the larger more competitive demographics (I'm mostly thinking Sci-Fi/WWE/BSG here, all of which appeals more to the Drama geeks than to the sci-fi ones.)
But that's just my 2 cents. Hulu/crunchyroll and the dozens of other sites will tide me over until the ads get too much, then I'll go back to reading and/or programming. But broadcast TV has seen the last of me, unless I ever get a Mu or Kappa for foreign OTA Satellite (Go do a search for it, there's a lot of channels out there if you don't mind the hassle of aligning your dish.)
I like directv, but I find that I am watching less and less of it. So much is crap.
Here's what I want...Pay per view video on demand.
Let me explain further.
Pay per view must be cheap enough that I don't really need to think about it too much...say 25 cents per show..
Absolutely no commercials!..Not even one!
Content should include every show that has ever been produced in the history of video, with good indexing and search
Yeah...I know it's a fantasy...but it would be cool
And no, I don't want to watch it on my computer.
I'm suprised nobody has mentioned tvtorrents.com It is a registration only website and it keeps track of how much you upload so that you can't be a leech. This makes downloads go MUCH faster. I really like tvtorrents. They have a very comprehensive list of tv shows.
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
And have probably saved $2000 in after-tax income. I stream hockey from web-sites, or over-the-air, and torrent the few shows we watch. We have a popcorn hour media tank for playing content on the tv, both high-def and standard dev.
When the company providing internet service is the same as the company providing cable, do you really think they will be ok with users dropping the cable service to obtain the same material over the internet medium?
Ex:$30 for internet + $30 for cable = $60 to Comcast
If I can get everything I want from cable over the internet, I'm going to remove my cable service.
$30 for internet + $0 for cable = $30 to Comcast. Users are getting the same amount of material for half the price. Result: Comcast will increase the cost of internet service or decrease the bandwidth cap so that legitimate users won't have enough to watch the material they want, forcing them to purchase cable again.
Every hi-speed internet outfit that isn't hella expensive around here requires you to order the TV portion as well, otherwise they charge you substantially more. So, I ordered tv and internet, and cancelled tv 31 days later. Doing so made my internet connection cheaper per month (with no promotional period), and made the installation free. I would have otherwise had to pay $250 for installation. I point-blank told the person I was going to cancel the tv service after a month and a day, and could they please just spare everyone the effort and not charge me installation, but...maybe my cleavage isn't good enough, cause he wasn't biting.
Not to pull the standard "I don't wtch tv" douche thing, but...
For the cost of cable for a year, I can pick up a pretty decent (insert hobby of choice here) guitar.
At the end of the year, I have something tangible that I could at least re-sell if I wanted (or upgrade) and many hours of entertainment.
With cable I have zip.
Cable is not the best value of my entertainment dollar.
I'll join the parade... gave up DirecTV years ago and never looked back. I can find just about all the shows I want to watch on the Internet for free, not to mention a ton of non-US stuff that would *never* get to see on cable or satellite. Every once in awhile I miss being able to sit down and channel surf when I'm bored, but it ain't worth $75 a month. And really, even if I had cable how many channels would I watch outside of the networks? 3? Maybe 4? And of those it's usually for 1 or 2 shows each. It's not worth the money. And it's worse if you have a hi-def TV cause it then costs even more to get the hi-def channels. Want a DVR? Ding, even more money. And let's not forget the $15-$20 in taxes, fees, and surcharges that's on top of the service. So your bill for the $60 basic cable tier is gonna be at least $75. Using the Internet I get 720p shows and the freedom to watch whenever I want at no additional cost. Pure win.
Maybe if they unbundled the packages and let us pay only for the channels we want with no surcharge for hi-def and DVR service I'd reconsider, LOL, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen!
Comcast here in central Pa has just swapped over to all digital, so the basic package went from the 8 local channels and another 20+ bleed-overs I could see for free to just the locals. So.. $10 for basic and $40 for InnnerTubes, or cough up another $60+ for extended basic and a box? Nah... I've got Hulu, etc if I really want to see something.
Ok -- I'll miss MythBusters.. just have to wait for the streams..
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
Not only that, but with all the amount of shows on DVD, I just have a PC connected to my TV, I rip all my shows to that, and use it like a jukebox. It's worth it to be one or two seasons behind what's on TV, since I don't have to watch any commercials, there are no bugs at the bottom corner and no slide-in ads, I don't have to worry about DVRs because I can pause it, and I can choose what to watch when I want. For everything else, there's PBS. Plus, I can easily transcode any of the videos on that TV PC to play on a portable device.
Purchasing shows on disc to own them permanently instead of paying on-going cable/satellite bills is a lot more worth it to me. I also get show commentaries which I like, and they rip fine to an MKV container.
Twinstiq, game news
I know this is /. but WTF? Do any of you every have a lady friend over who might want to watch tv, and not sit in separate chairs in front of the computer? Quit being cheap asses, get a tv, get cable, and for god's sake, get laid once in awhile. Trust me, spending your time making a woman cum is much more enjoyable then spending your time trying to find free/cheap tv. $71? are you fucking kidding me? Are you all that fucking cheap?
I was a subscriber to basic but they kept moving channels I watched to digital-only, meaning I needed to rent a box to watch them. Then when they kept replacing those, now, empty channels with shopping, religious and spanish-language stations I dropped it. All the content I wanted is available OTA or on the net so, I'm missing nothing. I'm certainly not missing the monthly bill.
If they offered digital tuners for free or, even better, had ala carte plans, I'd come back. It'll never happen though.
--- Do you believe in the day?
Been w/out a TV service since 2008. Hulu, cbs.com are plenty. Torrents for BBC shows. Been getting internet from my gracious neighbors as well. Have saved @ least $2400 in the last 2 years. I don't think, I'll pay another dime to comcast till I have my own kids.
Highly recommend it.
If you want to run your own wireless network at home while bouncing internet signal from your neighbor, get a WRT54gl and run ddwrtl of off it in wireless repeater mode.
I haven't read the article fully, but the poll involved asking people what they plan to do. But most people will put off that phone call, or once on it, will be talked out of canceling by the crafty cable salesperson.
And if 1 out of 8 are downgrading, how many are upgrading? If more than 1 out of 8 are, then the cable companies' business is going up.
I have internet only from my cable provider charter and am saving $100+ per month. Would never go back, for the one r two show I want to watch I just buy them from iTunes for $1.99
My roomie keeps threatening to reduce expenses by killing the cable TV.
Sometimes I think it annoys him when I reply with, "Fine by me.".
After all, I may have the TV on, but I watch almost none of it, certainly nothing I can't get from the internet, especially the stuff from other countries.
I just love surveys since they can be the opposite of reality. So while 1 in 8 say they'll cut the cord, cable and satellite subscriptions are at an all time high. http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_091116a.html
How good can it be, if it isn't HD?
My wife and I just moved and decided that paying $150 for Comcast Silver + HBO + HD "Bonus" was just too much. We moved out to Portland and subscribed to Verizon ViOS and cut our "media" bill to $85/month (we got a higher tier). I got "permission" to build a sweet HTPC and hooked it up to our 46" TV.
With Hulu, Netflix, a vast library of personal DVDs on a jukebox system, and a fat pipe to the Internet, we've been doing quite well. Unfortunately we like our sports and ESPN360 isn't really there yet. When we want some background noise, Aussies rule Footie has been great, but we're really noticing the lack of NASCAR, March Madness, and are worried about actual coverage of June the World Cup. We're actually looking at satellite to at least get the World Cup without worries.
How many of you have made the switch to internet-only TV, or are considering it?
sounds like the perfect topic for the next poll
And since my one television is a CRT style and I didn't get the digital converter gadget, I've had no broadcast television since the switch.
An old flaky DVD player, Netflix, and the occasional 10 minutes of Colbert or Stewart or SNL Weekend Update meet my needs. My wife supplements with shows on Netflix Instant View. The savings since 2000: roughly $10,000 in 2010 dollars, minus roughly $1800 in Netflix (if I had had it the entire 10 years), $2000 spent in bars watching sports on television while drinking cold beer and eating nachos, and $7.65 in late fees at the library.
How am I faring? Better for having not watched American Idol, Lost, 24, regular season MLB games, etc. Plus more money in my pocket and I've enjoyed watching all 100 on the AFI list as well as lots of other films, documentaries, and television series worth watching. Plus beer and nachos when watching sports.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
Even when I lived in Washington DC, my primary reason for having cable was the fast Internet that came with it.
When I moved, Internet-only cable was incrementally cheaper so that's what I got. Analog broadcast was fine for me, and now digital is great when it works. Heavy rain and wind seem to attenuate the signal enough to cause problems, but not enough to make me buy cable TV.
Of course, I tend to regard TV as potentially a vice. I don't watch too much, just as I don't drink too much. I'm certainly not going to purchase a TiVo or any other device to "enhance" my TV experience, so maybe I'm just a bit odd in this regard.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I can see dumping premium content but I still need cable to get high speed downloads. I like to watch shows in real time and not sit around waiting for them to down load.
This probably won't happen everywhere. I live in a rural community, and there's really no other options besides satellite or (in town) cable. Many people don't even have high speed internet - DSL became available just 2 of years ago, and our town still has a local dial-up ISP with enough subscribers to turn a profit. The nearest over-the-air TV station is over 60 miles away, so it takes a powerful antenna to get even a single station.
I personally could probably do without a lot of the channels on my Dish Network system. However, I like HIstory, History Inernational, Investigation Discovery, and Tru TV enough to keep it around. And my parents don't know how to use the internet, so they have to have something to watch.
TV is a way to get people to voluntarily plug into "the matrix" to get fed an artificial reality -- to have things put in your head that other people want in there ... Buy this product! Invest in this! Be scared, and continue to spend billions a day on the biggest socialist enterprise ever, the military industrial complex. Health, education and recreation are less important (leave those to nordic countries). The dollar is strong ... etc.
Content on the internet is more democratic, less controllable by big money, and much less dangerous to the notion that the best way for things to be rigged is in favor of the general public.
End of rant.
The thing keeping me from switching to a PC/Internet only experience is that on my 46" Samsung the "legal" programs (like Hulu, Crackle, Netflix) look pretty bad most of the time. Yes, some "newer" stuff on Netflix looks good - but most of it is compressed to 320x240 - or 640x480 and that looks bad on my large HDTV screen. It's akin to the 64kbps Napster downlaods of the late 90s. They soudned bad - but they were "free."
OAT programming is fine - but in my area we only get 8-12 HDTV stations OAT.
Now, the "illegal" programming like rips off of USENET or torrents can look really good - but not everything I watch is available.
On a computer screen (24inch and below in most cases) the "legal" sources look okay. Hulu has poor encoding - and I know that soon they'll be a lot more advertising on it - and on 90% of the other "legal" places to watch.
So until we get the same 1080i quality via the legal internet (and true 720x480 for non-hd shows) I'll keep my cable subscription. And I'll swithc to FIOS if it ever becomes available.
We cut off cable/sat almost 3 years ago. Netflix provides (streaming) whatever we don't get over the air in HD. In the DC/Balt market, we get about 30 TV stations, but I had to install both UHF and VHF antennas.
I was out of country on hard earned vacation in March, and sit down after a long day of recreation to pull up some movies on my laptop through Amazon (you know, the good pay the owner per movie per view way), but noooo! I'm not in the US so the site says I cannot buy the movies (same with several other sites I tried). WTF!?!
The pirates have the movies, they don't need to buy them. I am trying to give these morons the money they crave to watch the movies and they won't take it. I came very close to torrenting the movies, but my conscience has not let me so far. Why am I being punished for doing the right thing?
I haven't cable TV for 2 years now. Just recently moved in with someone and talked them into getting rid of it and saved $60 a month. NO REGRETS AT ALL. I use Hulu to keep up with the shows that I like so I'm not missing out on anything. I use the interwebs for news.
I'll be letting my Dual Tuner Dish DVR boxes grab all our favorite shows up to two at a time. We'll watch them exactly when we want to, and we'll skip over all the commercials by pressing the Yellow Arrow key on our remote 6 or 7 times.
I have been a cable pirate for years. I buy cable internet then slip the installer a $20 to not block TV... well, the last time I moved, the installer wouldn't do it. So I had to face up to my general belief that I don't feel that PAYING for TV is worth it. Well, as it turns out, I was right. While I miss the mind-numbing effects of Comedy Central, SciFi and Cartoon Network somewhat, I have a generally positive feeling about my choice. Turns out that the move to digital TV was great for me as I get all the local channels in high definition and clear as a bell. So it's not like I'm without local news and weather and the occasional weekday sitcom.
And I have been without cable TV programming for many months and I'm basically okay with it.
I would never have paid for all that ... I can't remember the last time I paid for TV programming at all so it would just feel weird paying for it I think. On the other hand, if you are accustomed to paying for TV, I can see where it might be a tough decision, so get yourself a digital TV and connect an antenna to see what is available out there to see what cutting the cable might be like.
They are most definitely overpriced... probably not entirely the cable company's greed as much as it is the greed of the networks but I'm sure there's enough fault to go around.
My only regret is that I still have to use BitTorrent to keep my viewing habits similar to what they were before cutting out TV. Not everything I like to watch is online in a timely manner with reasonable ad content. So I pirate to fill the gap. I'd really like it if more cable networks joined up with Hulu so I could stop. Torrenting shows, even with automatic setups, it a pain and a drain on my net connection.
I made the switch about 18 months ago, bought an apple TV and an HD over the air antenna.
The antenna sucks now that they've all gone digital. The signals are weak and I regularly can't get one station or another and I live in the middle of one of the largest 5 cities in the states. Apple TV is so so being relatively expensive and not having everything I want to watch. Hulu, etc. is ok but I prefer to watch it on my 55 in Mitsu Diamond internal projection TV which I can't due to the fact that it is too old to have an HDMI so I'm left watching it on a 30 inch computer monitor.
The single biggest "sacrifice" for me personally is college football. Sports in general are an issue especially if you're a hockey fan since the networks ignore hockey now, but as a college football fan who used to watch probably 80% of my school's games via ESPN, FOX Sports, and Pay per View, I now see just the ones that make it to network television.
All of that siad I don't see myself going back to cable/sat unless their service, quality, price, etc. improve. Since I don't see that happening I'm more or less waiting for a live/on-demand hybrid to come to the web and include sports. Additionally, I expect as I upgrade my TVs over the years it will become easier and easier as the connection and format issues sort themselves out.
I never had cable, and never will. If it doesn't come broadcast, we don't want it. I'd estimate that except for special stuff (my wife likes olympics), we watch less than an hour a month. My son uses the TV for console games.
Go to YouTube and do a search for "David Attenborough". You will find hours of quality programming.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
We've got a contract, so we can't just bail, but when it is up, that'll be the end of it. It isn't because of the Internet, though -- HD reception via satellite is much better quality than the vast majority of Internet streaming video. The reason why is that the programming is just terrible. The things that they put on television simply aren't the things that entertain me and mine. It doesn't matter where you get your programming if watching it makes you feel like you're wasting your time.
We do still have the Internet if something comes up we need to know about, and it's likely to be both more timely, and available on demand, news in particular. News networks - CNN, FOX, etc. - are just pitiful. FOX is like a work of (bad) fiction, and CNN is a reach-around fest for the clueless. Half a country can be in ruins and the top story on CNN will be that some Hollywood marriage is breaking up.
As far as what we continue to use the television for, there's still plenty without broadcast: XBox 360/HDDVD (yeah, we have a few), PS3/Bluray, Wii, DVD, and our media Mac. It isn't like we aren't entertained -- far from it. We've got an adequate collection of movies and games, too.
Television is probably the technology that had the most potential to be a force for good in our society. Today, it seems to me to be the technology that has least lived up to its potential. Not that it hasn't matured technically, no question that it has, but that the content is, socially speaking, crap.
There's some kind of thing that goes on in marketing, entertainment, and politics that almost always seems to go for the left side of the Gaussian, as if collecting the not-so-clever is easier than collecting the clever. Maybe it's just that simple. All I know for sure is that currently, television content is mind-numbingly awful, and on the rare occasion that they produce something worth watching, it rarely survives the seasonal cullings by the networks. And in the end, you can get all the shows on a DVD or Bluray (if you're lucky), and watch them without commercials, in very good quality, as many times as you like, and furthermore, you can legitimately loan 'em to your friends.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
We cancelled our cable about a year ago just because weren't watching much TV at all. Saved ourselves about $50/month. For us, it wasn't about the ads or the cost, it was just that we weren't really using it.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I cut the cord a few months ago simply because for internet and expanded basic I was paying about 120 a month. I only watched a few programs (Discovery channel mostly), and the couple shows I really like I can get online. For the most part the content is crud and I cannot justify my money going to support idiotic shows and networks that primarily produce immoral filth. I went to netflix, watch one movie a week or so and then stream older westerns and the like. Too bad BBC won't allow their shows to stream to the US, I miss Doctor Who and Top Gear.
i've been on analog cable for years, and with a proper PVR, i don't have to watch commercials (except for live tv of course)... problem solved.
I cut the cord years ago. The few shows I like I watch online, and like others say, if they start charging or making it too much of a pain to watch, I will just go without. Most of the time when I'm at a friends house that has cable/sat, I surf through and find nothing of interest on. So when I'm bored it just means I have to find something more productive and fulfilling to do then sit on the couch and watch whatever crap the media companies are trying to shovel down my throat this week. I like hulu a lot, and noticed they started taking back episodes offline. It's a shame because sometimes I show somebody a show they haven't seen before (like 30 rock) and can't show them more because of network greed. I think that now that anybody can host a TV show on the internet, their empire is falling, and they're going to try and squeeze every last drop out of it before it falls.
We got the internet through the phone company. You are right about the cost though, but since I am just pricing internet I consider it as getting a phone line for free.
For the cost of cable or satellite for a year ($70 * 12) = $840, you can afford to buy season sets of about ten series, assuming $80 per set, which is a high assumption; season sets frequently sell for a lot less.
And you get to keep it afterwards, and the quality is better than what you get on TV and without commercials.
So yeah, I canceled cable and haven't looked back. If you're willing to bend the law you can also get torrents if you want instant gratification. What the heck is the point of cable/satellite, unless you like sports?
I'm sure many fellow geeks who couldn't care less about sports feel the same way.
I am sure the various telcos are acutely aware of this trend, and have plans in place to cover their bottom line. When subscription numbers drop drastically, be on the lookout for internet connectivity prices to skyrocket. I sincerely doubt they'll go quietly into the night as half their business fades away while the other half makes the same money as before. Remember, they have the monopoly, they can do it.
Name...That...Autocomplete!
I wanna stop my TV service because there's no real TV. Everything they have is complete junk today. I was born in the 80's, like most smart people, and I can't bare to watch the dribble they have today. I loved to watch Megas XLR, and that's gone. They brought back the gayest sequel to Knight Rider in 2008, and it made me wanna find a black Firebird and drive away the suffering it caused. What ever happened to Anime? When American TV sucks, at least you can always fall back onto Anime. I loved watching Drawn Together and that's canceled too. All that's left is Adult Swim, and their stuff is getting retarded. Only Aqua Teen Hunger Force is worth watching. Nowadays I enjoy waiting for the next episode of RedVSBlue and whatever James Rofle makes. All internet based!
The Missus and I ditched Cablevision's digital cable almost a year ago to the day, and went with Boxee on an AppleTV. For us it's more than sufficient, we have our iTunes library in one place, can rent videos through ITMS, and still get a lot of independently produced content (which is usually much more interesting than the crap you'd find on cable tv) via Boxee and podcast and RSS subscriptions.
Sure, the AppleTV is a bit weak for HD content from any other source than ITMS, but for us it works. We don't miss cable, and we're listening to a lot more music than we used to. If only there was a different broadband Internet provider in my area, then we could tell Cablevision to bugger off for good, but when you're getting a 35Mb/s line for the same price as AT&T's 3MB/s DSL line there's no second thought about staying with Cablevision - as horrid as their service is, it still beats AT&T!
You're not getting any if she's focused on the TV.
Well, maybe doggy style so she can still see the TV. If she does cum, probably she's fantasizing about some guy on TV instead of you.
Evidence suggests that people fuck like mad when they can't watch TV. South-central Florida had a bit of a baby boom about 9 months after having a week or two of hurricane-caused power loss. No power means no TV, which means passionate fucking.
and neither i or my teenage son has missed it in any way. we both appreciate not being assaulted by advertising every 8 minutes for 2+ minutes about how we need to douche more, or how our lives might not be right and we need purple pill Q.
we actually discuss what might be a decent watch while deferring on matters of specific interest (like his current obsession with horror flicks; and my scfi). along the way we broadened our horizons in a more international way by timeshifting via the internet to suit our schedules.
the internet is truly the a la carte model a great many people have been hoping for, including the businesses themselves once they finally come up with a reasonable, non wallet rape, monetization of product.
Here is an alternative hypothesis that I find very informative on this issue. See link:
pfft, $15 / month over the phone line, very basic 1.5 Mbit ADSL.
Is that Canadian dollars or Australian dollars? The article is about the United States market, and U.S. providers don't appear to make such an offer. Where I live, the phone company is Verizon, and the ADSL offer is $29.99/mo for 1 Mbps for customers without Verizon home phone service (source).
Mr. Fancy pants rich fatcat insensitive clod with his high speed connection! A lot of us use FREE over the air TV signals. Works great, and since the digital changeover, we get a lot more stations.
I have been watching TV since we were the first family on the block to have a television. Yes, that long ago, and I will never pay anything more for it then my eyeballs looking at it, and I learned to ignore commercials decades ago, they don't even register anymore. Of course I don't watch that much either, but we have it, the same old 19 inch color CRT we have had for years and years that I paid 50 bucks for and "upgraded" with my socialist TV digital perverter box. That's all TV is worth to me.
You want to know why I won't pay for TV? Because I can remember going to the county board meeting long ago when those cable TV doofuses promised that if you paid for it, no commercials. Freaking liars. Once they got their monopolies, back to commercials. Screw 'em. had cable for a short time back then, then dropped it when they showed they were liars, never again. I boycott companies when they are dinks or liars, same as I started boycotting (new, I will snag heavily discounted used) the **AA members over priced DRM infested "products" once it was obvious they were never going to offer fair prices or stop being cartel jerks. Despite going through several alleged Federal "busts", they never stopped being jerks.
As to watching "internet TV" ain't happening outside of the dense/urban (mostly, I know there are some exceptions)low hanging fruit areas served with high speed connections. If you are stuck on low speed or dialup, forget it, even youtube won't stream easily.
I gave up TV because I couldn't afford it through college. I had to have the internet so I use it to watch the shows I wanted to watch. It has been the best non-decision of my life.
Comcast service was awful, sluggish and oversubscribed, frequent downtime in my neighborhood, and they jacked the rates 100% in 3 years. fuck 'em, dropped their tv and internet service four years ago.
now I have the most basic ADSL for less than a quarter the price and for the rare times I watch television free digital broadcast TV is sufficient.
I haven't had TV for like 8 years, with the exception of six months that I had basic cable (lifeline, they called it, for 20 bucks a month). I will say there's something to be said for live TV broadcasts, but I can do without them.
Sports is the biggest thing that has kept me subscribing. Most TV programs are available for download in some form. Sports is something you generally want to watch live. More content is being moved online but it often is very restrictive, blacked-out and expensive. Then again nerds don't watch sports do we?
Are the reason to get cable, satellite, fios, etc
I made a little rolling cart with a projector on top and inside a Roku box and Apple TV, plus a jack for external laptop. So between streaming Netflix, physical DVD's, Hulu and Apple TV I don't believe we're missing too much. We don't watch too much TV save for 'The Office' and 'Lost', but those are available on Hulu.
I gave away my TV in 2003. After a month I noticed that my IQ had gone up by 20 points and I was actually able to think for myself without input from talking heads and advertisers. Very liberating.
I didn't have any problems signing up for cable internet by itself. There wasn't even an installation fee.
I did eventually get cable TV several months later but ended up dropping it when I realized I was paying over $800 a year for something I hardly watched. There wasn't any problem with that either.
I never got cable/di$h setup when I moved into my current apartment. No motivation to do it really. I wouldn't have a land line if it wasn't part of my DSL package and I will take a strong look at fiber when/if it becomes available.
I started on a clunker laptop, got a tower, then a bigger monitor, then a nicer tower. (If there was a good place for it I would get a projector).
I spend a lot of time gaming with old timey radio on in the background. Its amazing how much broadcasting doesn't change (dl some Johnny Dollar, its pretty decent; also The Goon Show-see my sig).
From time to time I dl an anime series (dubs need not apply).
I'm not into sports, so that's not a deal breaker, I don't talk to anyone at work about TV shows (heaven preserve us from LOST fans [I do watch Lost, but I'm not a Believer (I was about to explain an episode to a coworker, but I cut it short and said a fat mexican blew up and old ship, and that was cool] ), so I can wait until the series is canceled and cooled off to enjoy it (Homicide, The Wire, etc).
Oh, and my family didn't own a TV until I was ~8, so not its probably not as ingrained.
Seagoon: Shut up Eccles!
Eccles: Shut up Eccles!
There are just too many adds on american TV. As an European born US resident, this is just unbearable. You have to have grown with it to not suffer from the obnoxiousness of adds. I never subscribed to tv in the us for that reason alone, and found many (legal) ways of satisfying my video entertainement needs, should it be netflix, hulu or various streaming from abc etc.
Heck, I gave up the TV cable years ago. Still using it for internet access, but no TV tuner box. No regrets. The stuff that I watch I can get as torrents, or wait for the DVD. Usually, I'll do both - watch the torrent and then get the DVD when it's available.
I connected my Samsung TV with HTPC running http://rapidtv.eu/. Although the sw is not yet stable/usable as I'd like, it works like this - via address bar you enter into google what you'd like to watch, then RapidTV clusters found rapidshare links and creates files. You select file and if the Play button is green (i.e. all links are ok and the file is what it claims to be), you hit it and within 5 seconds you're watching your favorite show with GOM Player.
Just like Vudu, but free & more movies/shows. Nowadays, TV is good only for watching sports and news.
Living in Alaska the cable was shut off in the Summer since around 1998.
Than I bought a big screen LCD TV About 2006 and wondered why I could not see the free over the air HD channels. My cable company informed me I needed a special converter box ($15.00 more a month) and the HD channel package
($10.00 more). 10 channels and 6 of them were the free over the air channels and the remaining 4 were worthless to me. So I told the cable company to shove it and bought a samsung HDTV receiver and can get 5 HDTV channels free
over the air.
They look great and with NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS and FOX plus a few more at 480P I am more than happy.
I have a few shows I cant get that a friend records for me on his Tivo and uploads for me. Than I just watch those on the big screen via the computer/ 360. Since then I have had a few friends do the same and often people are always
interested how I do it. Not everyone will do this but more and more people are finding this just fine for there needs.
Never! Not as in, "I'll never give up cable", but rather as in "I never had cable at all, ever".
By the time I was on my own it was obvious that the original selling point of cable - lack of advertising - had already set sail for Valhalla. I just never gave into the extortion in the first place. Can you take a stab at how much money I've been able to divert to other things because of that choice 20 years ago?
Never give them a dime. They suck. Let them shrivel up and die.
While it is true that I dumped pay TV, they still get my internet business. $70/month (after all the taxes and fees) isn't a small chunk of change for flakey 5 meg charter service. Heck, I can't use the new DRM games from Ubisoft because it drops for a few seconds every few hours on me (thus I'd get booted from my game).
However, I do try to find legitimate sources for streaming online. There are some exceptions - archaic modes of media distribution means here in the states getting Doctor Who legally is pretty much a no-go. Then there was the Battlestar Galactica fiasco where they decided to delay the final episodes 8 days instead of 1, so at that point you look to get your fix any way so your friends don't spoil it
So, yeah, I sort of ditched cable. Now the telcomms say they need to start charging by speed and usage - I say bill me for one or the other, not both.
As for the ads? Yeah, the sites I use have all gone an ad explosion recently. Armor Games has added slide up from the bottom annoy ads and I rarely go there now. Pop ups fly everywhere. Tom's has ads that choke my system, so I go there less. Slashdot is nice and clean, I show up here more and more. I don't mind ads, they pay for it, but once companies start blocking their valuable content with pop-ups, slide-ups/downs, please take our survey stuff that washes across the screen, or those really annoying push down banner ads (where all the content gets shifted down and then up while you are trying to read it) then I start to flee. Put them on the side, on top, on bottom, and even as your background wallpaper - just don't despoil your content with it.
I guess what I am saying is I am thinking that TV is just an ad-box, and the internet is pretty much that too. I guess I'll have to go with paper books - so far they haven't figured out a way to put ads over the content on those.... yet. (And no, eBooks don't count.)
I love to watch TV, but I hate the price. So, investing less than $100 at Frys, I put up a small antennae on my roof. Now with the help of TV Fool, I can pick up all the big networks and a few independents.
We (my family) cut Cable this year.
We boosted our Internet, and canceled all TV service.
Why? OTA digital broadcast is a MUCH higher quality. The "digital service" converter that the cable company supplied never worked properly. We only watch a limited selection of programs live, anyway. American Idol and the Winter Olympics. Both available OTA.
The loss of a handful of interesting specialty channels is balanced by the cost savings - FoodTV, Space, Comedy and Cartoon were costing us $100 every month.
The only practical downside? We used to get a channel called CP24, an "ADD" channel for the morning - weather, news, traffic, time, all on the screen at the same time. Too bad.
American Idol and the odd OTA we watch? The quality is amazing, Full-tilt 1080i goodness.
The programming we "miss"? EZTV. We occasionally get a "cease&desist" (happened with CSI and a few others). When that happens, I set the show to allow 0 uploading. If the download option dries up? Don't care, won't watch anymore.
I am the TV generation. We didn't have home computers or video games growing up. "All in the Family" was considered a communal experience. My kids have never known life without home computers. The TV has always been "just another alternative". Cable was no big loss.
It's a story that is probably being played out in thousands of homes.
PS. American Idol is probably the saviour for TV. Embedded advertising (Coke, Ford, AT&T). Cheap, reality TV. Can make money immediately based on cell-phone messaging. Time sensitive due to voting.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I ditched cable in 2005 in lieu of downloading shows, and it was one of the best things I've ever done with respect to my entertainment time and money. I simply Bittorrent all the new shows that I watch, which is incredibly convenient, because it allows me to watch them, commercial free, when I want to (instead of when the networks dictate that I should watch them), and I can also save them permanently by collecting a season at a time and then burning them to DVD.
Furthermore, it makes me use my entertainment time more judiciously. There's none of that bad habit of plopping down on the couch in front of the TV and spending an unsatisfying three hours watching whatever happens to be on, much of which is crap or reruns. Now I have a directory full of new episodes of shows (or backlogs of old seasons of shows I intend to watch), and I simply pick one and watch it. Unless I specifically choose otherwise, my entertainment is always new, fresh, deliberate, and uninterrupted by advertising.
I do disagree with the people who say that TV content sucks these days. A few years ago, when reality TV became the norm rather than the exception, I would certainly have agreed wholeheartedly. Nowadays, though, many great shows are being released, and although I hate to admit that I'm a TV junkie, right now I have a list of about 50 shows that I watch each year, and while some of them are simply mediocre, there are some really great programs on that list with exceptionally creative writing and acting. IMO, 2009-2010 has been an extraordinary year for television.
The 30/30 sounds like an introductory rate (almost exactly like COmcast's), but we will assume its not for argument's sake. If 30 dollars is internet service bundled, it is probably around 45 for the same speed as a solo service. So, a person has the choice of paying 60 for internet+cable or 45 for just cable. So, why would someone pay 15 a month for basic cable when they could put a fraction of that towards netflix or an ondemand service which gives them the commercial-free programming they want? Or use Hulu or another streaming service? 15 a month is 180 a year for nothing more than basic cable programming.
"How many of you have made the switch to Internet-only TV, or are considering it? Any regrets?"
My family is very close to eliminating cable TV. The article is right that price is a major factor, especially that it consistently increases at a rate greater than inflation, but worse than that is the fact that we pay more each year for more CRAP on TV (hello, "reality TV"), or the cable deals include many channels that we do not want at all. Honestly, we could probably get by with 3 channels: the Discovery Channel, a science fiction channel, and a news channel. Everyone has different tastes, of course, but is cable available like that? Unfortunately not. It's always bundled where I am. We have to pay for a lot we don't want. "Value for money" just isn't there, and the quality continues to decline.
Add that to the fact that, yes, some things can be gotten from the web (whether pay or free) and DVD box sets of the few TV programs of interest are usually cheaper than a month of cable, and, yeah, dropping cable seems like an obvious and practical conclusion. It's days are numbered at my house.
Now, I'd have to admit that we have free internet (I work for an ISP) but our internet bill would be around $30 a month if we didn't.
We used to pay about $80 for cable before we gave it up. Since I live in Canada, I don't really have access to Hulu.com, but CBC has all their content online, with all of the other stations (including most of the premium cable channels that we actually cared about) having about half of it, and growing.
The only thing I used to miss was Mythbusters, before discovery.ca started posting this week's episode. And if we really wanted to (and we have in the past) we could buy it on DVD. Most of the content we actually *want* to watch is available online, and we can watch it whenever we have free time - which is at a premium with a newborn and a 3-year-old. All without having to sign up for scads of crap that we're not in the least bit interested in.
The fact that the cable companies have never been interested in providing only the content that the customer wants has always been a sore point for me, as I hardly ever watched any of the basic cable channels.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
I was a DirecTV customer for nine years. I've been running home network with a PC on each TV for about the last four years, however, the PCs were just for watching movies, listening to music, and looking at pictures off the network.
Then I found the jewel that is the Hulu desktop. I don't watch a lot of TV, but everything I do watch is on there. The Hulu quality isn't very good on an HDTV but the interface is generally ok. So, in the end we dropped DirectTV and now the media PCs run the Hulu desktop, BeyondTV to get HDef over the air, and Boxee for everything else. It's pretty slick.
As a side note the guy at DirecTV would not let me go because I'd been a customer for so long. I think he must have made five different offers to me, each getting progressively better. In the end he offered me an upgraded package and nine months of free service. It was crazy.
I haven't had cable in over seven years, and I don't miss it. I refuse to pay for commercials.
"Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance." -- Hendrik Willem Van Loon
I'm still on free-to-air TV.
My last apartment had cable included in the rent. The one before that had TV and a 10BaseT connection to a T1 for some cheap price since the rent was so high for one room. This one doesn't. The cable company got rid of their 'low price options' because they 'switched to digital cable for higher quality'. They want a minimum of $80, for 30 channels that I don't care about. To get anything I would want to see, I would have to spend over $120. And to add internet would be another 40 to 50, which is nearly what my DSL connection costs. When I have $150 left for groceries at the end of the month, that isn't likely to happen. Easy solution was an antenna so I get local broadcast stations: cbs, nbc, ion. Then I picked up Netflix. When I get bored and would turn on the TV to just watch whatever is on, now I just turn on a movie or tv show that I want to watch. Mix in hulu for Burn Notice, a friend who has BBC-A so I can watch Doctor Who, and I find I don't miss cable at all.
I haven't owned a television in years, never mind cable TV service. My cable bill is ~$80/month for internet-only, but that's beside the point. According to a calorie burn calculator I just checked, a 180 pound human will burn approximately 81-86 calories per hour while watching TV. The same amount of time spent sleeping (depending on which calculator you use) will burn 96-155 calories.
When you are watching TV, your brain turns off.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
(Not really a coward -- just don't want to have to register YET AGAIN! When will these registrations link to our online creds?? Around the clouds, I'm known as JoyfulC.)
We gave up cable (in town) and satellite (out on the farm) a couple years back -- not because of cost, but because of 1) crappy programming; and 2) crappy customer service/technical support with the companies' other products (phone, internet access). We got tired of being shunted to help reps who simply weren't empowered to solve our problems.
We don't watch that much internet TV, but really, we just don't miss it. Often, I awake at 4 or 5 AM, and when we had service, I'd be clicking through the channels, finding mostly info-mercials. Now, I read an ebook -- much better!
This is yet another dinosaur industry that arrogantly thought it could hold onto its dominance in a changing world. Good riddance.
Been unhooked since 2004, and since then its just gotten easier and easier to get content. Hulu is alright, but its too restrictive in content. I don't think its fair to expect content for free, so that's why Netflix is my favorite cable-replacement service. You pay a reasonable price and get a very amazing service with a huge library.
I didn't have cable up until about four years ago. But then we had babies, and having Dora, WordWorld, Sesame Street and Little Einsteins on tap in the DVR is a godsend.
Yes, yes, we interact and read them books every day, but you still need time to fix dinner.
When we first got dial-up, I was given the choice between that and cable TV.
Dropped the TV and haven't looked back since.
What interesting timing of this article.
We just got rid of our dish service and have moved to viewing our shows on the internet. We didn't watch that much on the dish anyway. I had already found the few shows that I wanted to watch online.
Making the jump was much easier than I thought it would be. I am also discovering new shows and catching missed shows of previous seasons.
My next step is to connect a PC up to the TV. Several of my friends have already made this change. It's a lot like people ditching a land line. It was only a matter of time.
We gave up TV about 2 years ago, but still the cheapest broadband available to us was $50 a month (for the first year) cable. When it jumped to $70 a month, the cable company offered us Internet and TV for the original $50.
We still watch everything on the web, but as long as it's still cheaper to have television and Internet together, we will always have pay TV. I see this happening for as long as television providers have a monopoly on high speed Internet in most communities.
No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness. --Aristotle
I figure we've saved about $8000 and countless hours because we cut the cord 10 years ago. .. here's how we stay in touch:
TV:
- OTA broadcast - more recently a one time ($100) upgrade to DTV
- On-Demand Internet - Hulu and TV network websites (+$30 / month for 1.5m DSL)
Movies:
- borrow older movies and TV shows for free at our local Library (free)
- Rent current movies from Redbox or Blockbuster's imitation (1-3$/day)
- we'll be signing up for Netflix soon
Mindless pop culture:
- trolling youtube for 'popular' videos
I dropped cable tv a couple of years ago in favor of OTA and Netflix. I don't consume a lot of online TV/Video, as I also cut cable internet service back to the lowest tier (768kb/128kb) at the same time. Still, I can generally watch a show on Hulu or Netflix instant-view (on my Wii) in SD with minimal buffering.
I'm fortunate in that I actually get a little over the advertised rate from my ISP, and I live in an area where all the major broadcast networks have a tower within easy range of attic antennas. I get all the TV I have time to watch, and I'm paying over $100 less per month than I was when I had higher-speed Internet and digital cable.It did cost money to buy antennas and build a nice mythtv box to record shows, etc. but these have paid for themselves already.
I will not get satellite or cable again until/unless I can view all the content legally on said mythtv system. This may never happen.
We need La Carte now and right to buy the box and not be forced to rent them at high cost $16/m - $20+ /m each??
Commercials are what pay for (or at least subsidize) the programming. So either we pay more for programming, or keep paying as much for products (unless we don't buy the sponsoring products/services - or only get store brands - and leave it to brand name buyers to pay for the products, and thus the programming...). It does gripe me when we have to pay for channels we don't watch on cable PLUS general price increases from cable providers PLUS higher prices of brand name products we do prefer over store brands. Oh well: "TANSTAAFL" (There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch).
Considering how ineffective most commercials are at getting most of us to change established tastes, I would not be surprised that another big breaking bubble will be that of commercial sponsorship of a lot of programming, as was seen to some extent with this past SuperBowl. I love clever/amusing commercials, but those are simply an art form in themselves, and will never change my tastes in beer/soda/cereal/etc, and Iusually do not even remember what product was being advertised unless it is very central to the particular commercial.
RO
RO
The problem is that one has to subscribe to 300 channels in order to get about 5 that has one or two watchable programs per week. The end result is equivalent to having one decent channel for your $70 per month, which is rather costly.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Getting ready to do this myself. I have a retired iMac I'm hooking up to my TV (have to do it by composite cable, unfortunately), and am ready to drop my DirecTV. Only 2 shows I can't seem to replace on the internet: Doctor Who and X-Play. Everything else is already available for free online. Save about $80/month. Also need to find some sort of weekly TV checklist so I don't miss anything. Got everything else figured out.
I haven't had cable TV in something like fifteen years. The day Comcast insisted I had to pay for a "package" of five channels, four of which were garbage, in order to watch the one channel I wanted, which was the Sci-Fi Channel. My only question is: What took the rest of the public so long?
And don't miss it in the slightest. Okay, I do watch the occasional show on Netflix or streamed online. The internet is my TV, newspaper, and magazines.
And when the ISPs see a huge increase in streaming traffic, what do you think they're going to do, I mean BESIDES toss in massive ads and jack up prices?
I was TV-less for a long time, technically I still am, but the various women in my life were all TV junkies. Our cable bill is rather obscene (by my standards at least), but the wife can't live without her Survivor/Lost/Heroes/WB. We have an "everything" package, because they bundle things in such predatory fashion that she can't trim off the fat without losing some essential channel.
This isn't to say I don't watch shows, but I can count them on one hand and it's trivial to find them online. Would I pay for these shows a-la carte ? Sure! Price them a buck per episode, yank out all the ads and I'm there... but I don't see that happening in this universe.
Even when there's a show I want to see with the wife, I prefer to download it without commercials, rather than tune in at a specific time, or time-shift with the PVR. For one, the interruptions annoy me, and frankly I can find better things to do with the 18 minutes they waste for every hour. I also don't give a flying fuck about the latest tampon marketing buzzword or the local "news" about some ginger kid curing a 3-legged puppy of canceraids.
Let me put it this way: if the wife ever leaves me, or drops dead, I will suddenly have $200 more to blow on hookers and booze. Hmmm... tempting!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I just noticed here we lost TLC, HGTV, TOON, and a few other channels. Called up Comcast and they tell me that they've moved the channels to digital. I either need to upgrade my service and get boxes or rent boxes for each of my TV's.
I pay more than enough for freakin' extended basic let alone any of the other obscenely priced packages. Once the scale tips and they've taken enough away I will just stop watching.
This is also slowly rendering the tuner cards in our desktops and the media PC useless. Not happy.
We cut cable TV last year. When we had cable, 99% of the time we were watching the local channels anyway. After the DTV switch we got a ton of free channels. The only thing we couldn't really live without was our DVR, so we bought a DTVPal DVR by Dish Network - works decent, no monthly fee.
Don't miss cable, or the expense, one bit. Couldn't be happier with the decision.
What is really fun about this is by in large cable still wins, for years cable companies have been repositioning themselves as an ISP and not a media provider. Simply put they loose market share in the video markets but gain a proportionally larger amount of business in the internet spectrum. so it's not really going to hurt cable company that much but believe what you want the cable company has already heard what its subscribers want and need.
My parents live in Rural Florida (not a big city) and have DSL from a local ISP and SkyAngel, which is an IPTV provider. SkyAngel uses hardware and software from Neulion, and Neulion's stuff all seems fairly clever to me. The Discovery Channel is recently no longer available on SkyAngel. The reason for this is quite interesting!
My take on it is that the big cable and TV networks might have figured out that IPTV might be a threat to their business model and they have to try to pre-emptively put the IPTV providers out of business before they really catch on. My guess is that Discovery Channel, which makes most of its money from the big cable TV networks, was probably "told" to discontinue offering their programming on IPTV networks such as SkyAngel. I bet it was an offer they couldn't refuse, or something like that.
The official information is in press releases such as the one at http://www.skyangel.com/discovery . They paint it as a contract dispute. Of course SkyAngel has filed a complaint with the FCC or FTC or some regulatory agency. The legal battle is described on various blogs which you can find by googling "SkyAngel Discovery"
It will be interesting to see if the cable TV networks prevail on this one, and if they succeed in putting the upstart IPTV providers out of business before it catches on.
I've moved from DirecTV to XM-Radio.
I like music while I geek and used to listen to it via DirecTV. Then DirecTV ditched XM Radio for Sonic and Sonic sucked, so I ditched DirecTV and bought what I really wanted/use: XM Radio.
If you're wondering, yes, there is some repetition with XM Radio *BUT* it *IS* ad-free.
When I've hired Hertz (or is it Avis?) for long drives, I hear *HOURS* of music without any ads - there will be some talking _about_ the music, but _NO_ ads.
It is heaven.
It might cost more than Internet but my radio quality doesn't suffer from when I'm downloading, either.
Get $15 set of rabbit ears and see what you can pull of the air. I have no cable but still got March Madness in HDTV and am getting NHL playoff hockey in HDTV.
The airwaves are still there.
Commercials are what pay for (or at least subsidize) the programming.
No they don't. They just hide the cost and foolish people think they're not actually paying because the costs are hidden in the products they buy. Not to mention taking billions of manhours per year watching/avoiding advertising drivel.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
My wife and I are about to drop our cable, again. We signed up for it again so we could watch the Olympics (we live in Victoria, about 100m from Vancouver). We went to drop it, and the cable company (actually Telus, the Phone company) offered us 3 months free instead. We will likely drop it at the end of those 3 months though.
I have long thought that when they started allowing an increase in the number of TV Channels, the quality started to drop. This makes perfect sense to me because there is essentially a fixed amount of advertising revenue to be had, and thats what pays for the quality TV development. More channels means less revenue per channel, and as a result less budget for each show overall. The end result is absolute shit like Survivor and the other low budget "reality tv" shows - that bear no relationship to reality whatsoever, and are missing the quality part of the content. I know those shows are insanely popular with deeply stupid people, and there are a lot of those deeply stupid people, but there are a lot of us who think shit is shit.
As well, the amount of time per TV hour that is actually advertising not show, has increased exponentially. If you are watching a repeat of an older show - or something from say, The BBC (where quality still exists) - you are seeing less and less of it as it gets chopped up to allow for more advertising.
Actually within the last year and half or so, ALL of the TV shows my wife and I watch tend to come from the BBC. I am sure the BBC has crap too, but we get the cream over here for the most part. The rest can be viewed via the web by some means or another. Shows like Top Gear (my favourite I think), Wire in the Blood are miles above anything I see coming from North America in terms of entertainment.
Now, someone above mentioned "The Wire", and having watched that on DvD, I have to agree that that series was an amazing TV production. One of the best TV Series I have ever seen in fact. Obviously quality is possible when the network wants to produce it, its just that with so much time to fill up, the tendency is to produce cheap crap as filler.
For the most part, I would rather spend my time playing an MMO than watching most TV content. At least the later is somewhat mentally engaging, whereas TV is essentially passive.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Or rather, cut the satellite subscription.
If it's available via Netflix, I watch it that way.
Otherwise, I check iTunes and the PSN video store.
Then as a last resort, BitTorrent.
It's surprising how many companies don't want to sell me their shows, but everything I really care about is available somehow.
I tend not to use Hulu because they've made it a PITA to watch it on my TV.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I have been living almost a year without cable. Stream Netflix to my PS3 and watch sports on espn360. I only miss Sportscenter, whenever I am able to stream that I will never ever get into a cable contract again. Without a change in there pricing and contracts cable companies are doomed. Too expensive, poor customer service and ironclad contracts.
1. Too Expensive - With Comcast, 5% a year for nothing sounds about right. They're doing it to our cable internet too, while downgrading our line speeds at that.
2. Underutilized - The net really has displaced most of my TV viewing time, and the few things I do want to watch on TV are only on at certain times. Those things get watched, and then the TV gathers dust. I'm definitely not getting my money's worth.
3. God Awful Programming - Channel lineups have been disintegrating for years, and long-running shows I used to like are mostly past their prime. Law & Order? Not since Jerry Orbach died. SVU? Not since it became the 'Law & Order Preachy Liberal Soapbox Hour'. Sorry, but when I can predict what your next episode's going to be about by browsing Huffington Post, you've lost me. I'll be honest with you guys. The last thing I used to watch on a regular basis was Adult Swim, and Adult Swim has been terrible for years. The rest of the channels and their new programming just don't attract my interest, especially all the trashy prime-time stuff. Old programming I can get reruns of, legally or otherwise, on the web. (Which I do for my Star Trek: TNG fix. Don't worry, I plan on getting a box set to sit next to my DS9 real soon.)
4. Over The Air Satisfies My Needs - I can get news, local programming, and the weather over a digital receiver. Remarkably, it gets a ton of channels around here. There are no more or fewer ads over the air than there are on cable during programming, though they do go off the air for infomercials more often. But most importantly, over the air has Channel 20. Weather radar. Get this, on cable, we had two radar channels hosted by two of the competing local news networks. First they added news tickers to the bottom. Then one of them made it so the weather radar appears once every five minutes or so, with the rest of the time being national forecasts that nobody who pays attention to Channel 20 gives a single damn about. The other one shrunk the radar screen into an unintelligible thumbnail-blob that hung around off the edge of the screen, and ran a daily news loop in the rest of the screen, while replacing the ticker with ads. Then both of them started airing commercials, which took up fully half of the programming time. Now, both channels are off the air on cable, but trusty old Channel 20, with its all-radar-all-the-time programming is still around for free. Incredible.
For the most part, the death of cable isn't just because of superior availability over the web. Cable and satellite companies are in open collusion with each other (they advertise on each others networks while, when one hikes prices, the other does too, essentially using the excesses of their competitors to excuse themselves for the same) and are being badly mismanaged. More importantly, -new television programming is terrible-. In aiming for the lowest common denominator, the television stations have shot through the floor, and no amount of transition to the web is going to change that. The value of their services hasn't just stagnated as prices rise, it's actually falling, and with more and more people looking to trim the fat off of their monthly expenses, cable is an obvious choice. I really think that with regard to the wider trend, economics has a lot more to do with it than the other reasons I've given, but because of everything else - the crappy programming, the cheaper (or free) stuff online and over the air, and actually realizing just how little they miss TV - I don't think many of them will be coming back.
I would pay for cable/satellite if I could do the following...
1) Get the channels I want and nothing more.
2) No, or very very little advertising with no increase (like how Cable was supposed to be ad-free in the 80s and they snuck them in and have ramped it up).
-----------------
Get me a price on:
CNN, CSpan, HGTV, Food Network, History Channel, Discovery Channel, and Spike TV......
That's all I would ever want and thats all I would ever feel good about paying for. And the price can be higher, just get rid of the ads. My house and my television are not the place where I want people trying to sell me crap. I go to the store for that.
Do some honest business with me and I'll give you my honest buck. Bundles and ads are junk.
Having experienced the programming the local Pay TV operator here in Australia (Foxtel) has to offer, its mostly the same wasteland as the free-to-air commercials are. (the documentary channels like History arent bad but its way too expensive to get it just to get those) Plus, its 25% owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and 50% owned by Telstra, 2 organizations I have as little as possible to do with (the only reason I ever have to deal with Telstra is because they own the local phone lines so I have to have a phone line with them to get my DSL (at least until my company finally puts their own hardware in the local exchange)
.. and couldn't be happier.
It wasn't so much that we switched to internet (we did somewhat for my wife's foreign language programs) but a value for money proposition. We were getting close to zero value (unless you count our daughter's watching Treehouse or whatever it was .... and that was becoming a problem).
We have been better off financially without Rogers, and our daughter gets 2 movie nights a week and she is FAR better behaved/attentive/learning enabled without television. We're a few years behind (starting on Madmen now) but there are definite advantages to that. We don't waste time on crap,or ads.
I cut off cable three years ago after this dumbass redneck cable guy who was there to install cable internet only, told my wife she could get free expanded cable "because Charter doesn't put filters on internet-only subscriber's lines in this town because they though the people were too stupid to realize that they could get the free cable". What he didn't realize was that I had basic already- don't ask me why I ever did, I know I know! He then proceeded to hit on her...she was 8 months pregnant at the time. What a douchenozzle. It gets better- he failed to install it right, so two days later TWO MORE come out [one was a supervisor], and still couldn't get it right. They had to call the regional foreman [or whatever he was]. This guy figured out that the first guy called in the WRONG MAC ADDRESS! :D
Charter= bumbling redneck clowns!
I wish the States had something akin to Freeview.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
I thought the backhauls were encrypted even more tightly than Dish and DirecTV.
Damned if you do damned if you don't. They just put ridiculous caps on the amount you can download.
I haven't paid for cable or satellite tv in close to 10 years now. Blockbuster started the no late fees thing very shortly after I moved out of my parents house. I used that for a long time to watch movies and tv shows. The only downside was being behind on whatever the current tv series' were that my friends were all talking about. After awhile I switched to netflix due to being cheaper and having a wider selection of movies available, even with Blockbuster's through the mail offering.
As soon as netflix streaming was available on my xbox 360 I installed it. In the last year or two they have even started getting episodes for some tv shows right after they air on network tv.
Aside from being behind on some shows, I don't miss a thing. I can watch a bunch of episodes of a show in a row if I want rather than waiting a week. I can watch old shows easily and not be at the mercy of whoever picks which re-run to show if re-runs are even still on for it. I can watch whenever I want rather than only at the time they air it, which may not be at all convenient for me. It's definitely worth being behind on some current shows by a season, which as I understand it, may not even be the case with other streaming options but I am only really familiar with Netflix streaming.
Broadcast PBS Friday nights for the yelling heads, sometimes nature shows. Colbert Report and Daily Show over the intertubes for the news. Otherwise, no cable, no satellite TV.
Perhaps they will all go out of business; what little I see of TV (usually on business trips), suggests that they deserve it.
For more than 10 years ... ever since I started University.
I've not actively watching TV for about 5 years or so. As it is currently, most of the shows I watch either don't air here/air edited for commercials on BBC America/air at an annoying time for my schedule, so I watch them online instead maybe a day after they air. If I was in control of the cable bill for my house we would have had an extra $80~/month years ago.
I haven't had cable since 2001, except for a brief period (with digital cable, new & shiny) in 2004. DVRs still weren't quite the thing in 2004, though, so in general I discovered that there was (still) nothing on, even for $75/mo. I mostly watched Stargate SG-1 reruns on the SciFi channel. Making any sort of "syfy" golden age argument, however, would be a serious mistake: in those days Stargate reruns were just the leader for...Crossing Over with John Edwards. Oh, an CSPAN. It's all over the internet and satellite radio now, though it is, problematically, still financially supported by cable companies.
Today, it is perfectly possible to do the same thing I have been doing since 2001, without even breaking copyright law (well, mostly). For example, recently I (finally) watched all 17 episodes of the classic (1967) "The Prisoner." For some reason AMC won't put it on Hulu (though there is a link), and instead makes us watch it in their crappy player with inserts one 30-second Google video ad at the beginning, one around eight minutes, and one whenever you pause it and then maximize or minimize (and if the moon in in the house of Jupiter...). Further...there was only one ad available. That's right, I watched the exact same fucking 30-second content-less Siemens ad roughly 50 times...in a row. They don't even have consumer products. "Imagine an America..." in which I don't fucking want to murder every person in Siemens advertising agency and everyone who was involved in this technical clusterfuck at AMC or Google ads!
Now that I am calming down, I will say that AMC's decision to maintain "control" of their video appears a bit counterproductive from a commercial standpoint. This model is still...immature. Since it was The Prisoner, the mindfuck, irrational aspect of showing me the same meaningless ad until I was losing my sanity was actually oddly appropriate, though. It's a pity the parallel wasn't intentional. Still, we have reason to hope. If AMC can somehow make money that way, just think of how much they will rake in with a less Kafka-esque profit model. For a similar experience, I recommend reading the C.S. Forester's excellent novel "The Good Shepherd" in one sitting, after remaining awake for thirty-six hours. Whoa.
Some day...there might be some sort of...market...where better shows are rewarded, and awful shows are canceled. Instead of "ratings" there will be "revenue." An unlikely-sounding dream, I know, to say nothing of the dangerous meaning of "better." If people will now spend less on TV, something may have to give, but I doubt it will be anything that we will actually miss. Besides, the internet offers the added value of targeted advertising and accurate (by TV standards) metrics. There is obviously enough demand for what AMC and HBO (and Showtime, and FX, and even...ESPN) are producing (since people pay extra for HBO & Showtime & certain ESPN already), just like the book market has room for John Barth and Gene Wolfe at the same time as Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer without the (TV-esque) need to generate sales for Barth and Wolfe by bundling them with vampire-romance-thrillers. There's even room for John Irving to sell the same novel fifteen times, so maybe sitcoms will survive...de gustibus non est disputandum?
Are there good places to watch live sports on the Internet like American's NBA, NFL, etc. without paying?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
One reason a lot of us keep giving the cable company full access to our bank accounts (Time Warner in my case) is simply the ease. I'm in my mid-thirties and don't watch nearly as much TV as when I was growing up, and most of what I do watch can be found in various places online. However, finding them and keeping up with what is current or next to be watched is no simple matter, and certainly not as easy as subscribing to a podcast. This turns some of us off, and the need to locate everything is like the opposite of a DVR, in terms of convenience. Cable is much easier to manage, even with my crappy-ass Scientific Atlanta 8240HDC box (I hate you with a passion! Was your interface designed in 1954 by a monkey trained to be a civil engineer?) and Time Warner's inherent crappiness.
/. readers) are into sports, which pretty much need to be viewed live, or at least nearly so, to prevent spoilers. My local MLB team has its own channel, the NBA team has a regional Fox Sports channel, and the college football team I follow has a lot of games on ESPN and the stupid BIG Ten "network". Finding these games online in HD and for cheap/free is nearly impossible. I concede that our NFL team is usually broadcast over the air, though that requires a pretty decent antenna at my outlying location, which is too much considering the only other things I like on broadcast TV are The Office and the occasional peek at Conan O'brien or Jimmy Fallon. OTA digital HDTV sucks, in my experience. Not putting a tower up for that, so I continue to be gouged for cable. And AT&T is the local Bell, with U-Verse available in adjacent counties, though they can't even tell me when it might be deployed here, so their version of the standard rip-off is not even an option. Cable it is! *ewwwww*
Then there's the matter of sports. Yes, I said that on slashdot. Seriously. A lot of us (cable/satellite subscribers, not
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
We dropped cable TV when we realized we were paying close to $100 a month for Robot Chicken and South Park - and not much else that wasn't already available on free broadcast TV. Much as I like Robot Chicken, it's not worth $25 an episode.
So we tossed the lot of it, and now rely on a tiny spare box running MythTV (the LinHES distro, get it at http://knoppmyth.net/ with a Hauppauge HVR-950 USB tuner-stick for all our over-the-air HDTV viewing. The antenna is just a fifteen-foot length of TV coax from Radio Shack with one connector cut off and the insulation and shield stripped back three feet, stuck out the crack of a window. It works great!
The ATSC HD TV is clearer than the analog cable we had. And for the movies, we use NetFlix; no commercials, no post-facto editing, and fifteen bucks a month.
We're in bliss. :-)
I'm hoping a media exec reads this. I'll happily pay $90/month to watch whatever I want over the internet on my gaming console on demand. I live in the future so that's what I expect and that's my price point. I haven't had cable in 5 years. Until you provide this I'll pay $20/month for netflix and torrent the rest. I'd like to pay for it, but itunes/amazon/netflix have a shitty digital selection priced the same as blockbuster. If online rentals charge $4 (same as blockbuster) why does the selection still suck? I don't understand the hesitation to make content available online. Soon as the industry gets on the ball I'll pay for more content.
I have an antenna in my attic and I receive all local channels in perfectly clear digital and many in HD (so I can watch those marvy reality shows and Rick Steve's Europe and Brian Williams News! PBS rocks!). Why pay the high prices for cable, satellite or IPTV when I'm only interested in a handfull of channels that they offer above what I already receive for FREE?? Who cares if they have 1000 thousand channels if I'm only interested in 5 of them? Until cable/satellite/IPTV companies offer A LA CARTE channel selection at fair (read, ridiculously low) prices, I'm not buying! I would RUN to a startup that offered such just to spite and get revenge on the incumbents for their greediness.
I recently cut myself off from COX cable + DVR + HD + Digital phone. I upgraded to 12 mbps down / 2 mbps up internet. I was too lazy to unplug the coax from the TV's. I discovered that the free OTA channels are still being delivered over cable. I still get the main network channels in digital and HD along with some local programming. This is a perfect setup. I guess they don't stop delivering the freebies when you are getting cable based internet. My TV's have streaming NETFLIX and Amazon as well as main channels for news, sports, etc... One TV has a PS3 with games and NETFLIX. My cable bill went from $136 to $59
After over 10 years of USSB & DirecTV subscriptions, I canceled in 2004. The ever-increasing prices combined with the almost pure garbage (or worse) product, made this an easy decision. In hindsight, perhaps on the order of a 'best-ever' decision.
With a modest $40 investment in a HDTV receiver and an old pair of rabbit ears, I've got more than enough full-bandwidth HDTV to whet my appetite.
If in fact say 1/2 of the people dump cable/sat, whats going to give. Are the remaining subscribers going to get a huge increase, or are the sports franchises going to take it in the shorts. This could be huge. I think the article said that 1/2 of the payout from cable/sat goes to pay sports programming.
TV viewer in UK, love UK TV programs, no ads and program quality is well high, good world news coverage, football, and international affair coverage such as World Cups, etc. I am fed up with TV in the US, rude and loud commercials are just horrible, personally I believe US has a fundamentally wrong approach. So I have stopped watching TV since 2007. I have Comcast internet only and will not pay for TV with stupid commercials. I would rather pay a higher price for a commercial free channel.
As an aside, I looked into FiOS tv since they claim it's cheaper and better than DirecTV. What I found was that it actually costs more once you factor in the rental fees on the converter boxes. Also they pretend to offer discounted prices on their bundle packages (phone, tv, internet) but the discounts assume outrageously high base prices that nobody in their right mind would pay anyway (e.g. $56/month for POTS!)
We have Netflix, a hacked AppleTV, DVD players, and a computer in pretty much every room. We don't need subscription tv anymore.
Cut out the TV. The dam thing isn't a mind control device but it doesn't exactly help you to think on your own two feet.
I watch maybe 20 minutes of BBC on NPR and that's it..
Also- think about swapping your WoW habit with some self study. I'm currently practicing [sic leveling] Japanese.
nihongo ga wakari masu ka? (wth slashdot for no unicode support...)
New slashdot layout sucks.
Yep, we cut the cable in 2006. I miss a few of the shows, but most were just fluff, anyway. Considering that I ended up watching 'On Demand' most of the time, or one of the Discovery/NG/History channels, well, we've never felt disadvantaged. Well, ok. I do miss the Weather channel. I don't miss the commercials. I really like not missing the commercials. Hulu is good. I'd pay a pittance for it - for higher quality and no commercials, maybe a pittance and a half. But certainly no more than my Netflix subscription. I've gotten quite spoiled on streaming Netflix, and season collections of TV series. Maybe they are a few months late, but frequently there are extra features on the discs that streaming, cable and broadcast just don't provide.
My Eye TV runs a digital antenna (important to have current antenna) looking at the Mt. Sutro Giant Trident looming over San Francisco from West Richmond. Fifty-two channels, some very weird, many foreign language, but including all the Networks. A ROKU box for Netflix movies, since I have an old PPC Mac Mini. $9/month (yes, nine) 24mb comcast line for nefarious porpoises.
I cry fowl. I seriously doubt that 1 in 8 are giving up TV. I know that there are a minority of techies here that have given up on TV and have switched to using the Internet and Netflix. But the majority still watch cable or satelite TV.
I do agree that there may be a trend of people dumping cable or satelite over the last few years as a result of the recession. After all, if you have lost your job, are just barely making payments on your mortgage, or are under water because of a financial situation, the first things people will do is cut back on non-essentials. However, these types of cuts are rarely permanent. People usually restore these services once they get jobs, get clear of debt, etc.
Like it or not, we are stuck with the cable and satelite companies for approximately the next decade. The internet infrastructure in the US just does not have the capacity to support HD streaming video. It would take a either major infrastructure upgrade or a breakthrough in compression technology to get us to that point.
Ah... well that is cool, but a big catch. Mounting an antenna somewhere is quite a tall order, seems like setup would be a real pain.
Could explain why it hasn't caught on so much...
Did that long ago, even longer if you count SAT card/account cloning.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
Toaster Of Doom
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I gave up my cable for a combination of OTA, BT, Hulu and the library in 2007. In addition to those other sources, SOME cities have a good public library system. Here in Las Vegas, NV you can get almost anything that is available on DVD. Sometimes they don't have a lot of copies of the popular items, but you can get on a waiting list. I am currently catching up on my SG-1, SGA, Star Trek DS9, BSG, Dr. Who & Torchwood. It's almost a perfect system.
Internet killed the video star
After 10 years with Cable TV in my appartment I finally cut it off last week. When I first moved in I went for everything, full premium package, it was just $79/month after the initial 6 month special of just $39/month. Over the years they added more and more channels I would never watch, I dont care for nor need 6 shopping networks. And slowly I watched the bill keep being increased each year till it was $135/month for the same cable setup. Add in the $50 for high speed internet over cable and taxes and I was paying close to $200/month. Last few months I realized the premium movie channels were all playing the same movies at the same time, and none were really anything I cared to see, nothing was ever "on". I also realized the only channels I was constantly watching were the base 4 broadcasts (Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC) and the SyFy channel and the Discovery history and science channels. For $30/month I could get those channels. But then again, rabbit ears and I can still get the local channels and I can catch what I want to see from SyFy online... So I dropped everything except my broadband connection. Its funny the cable companies state the price is so high because of all the channels, but I dont want all those channels. They tell Congress they cant unbundle because many of these channels would go out of business. Then let them, if people actually want them, let them subscribe to them. I dont need the Manderin news network nor the home shopping networks or the battered wives network, etc... Cable companies can do any show "on demand" now, so there is no reason they cant give the consumer a check list and say, pick the 10 channels you want for $5/month or 25 for $10, etc... I don't need, want, or use 600 channels.
What is this "TV" that you speak of?
I live in the land of Qworst and Comcast. I gave up on Qworst DSL a couple of years ago and switched to Comcast. I had no desire for cable tv and bought the service without Cable. A couple of months later, some nice person from Comcast called and tried to sell me a bundle with phone and cable for like $20-$30 / month more than I was paying for internet alone. I asked them how much was Cable + Internet vs. Internet alone and it turned it Cable + Internet was $67 and Internet only was $73. So, I've got cable. It sucks and I don't watch it, but I've got it. BTW, Hulu kicks TV's ass. I can watch a show on Hulu with 5 mins of commercials or I can watch the same show on TV with 22 minutes of commercials. I'm considering netflix on-demand or Amazon.
and wish I had done it sooner. I actually did it by accident. I had satellite and uverse became available. They offered a free digital video recorder (DVR) for about $5 cheaper. Unfortunately performance sucked, so I canceled it. Then it occurred to me that I had been a directTV customer for years and they should give me a DVR to keep me. I requested it, they denied so I said, cut it off. THE VERY NEXT DAY, I get an offer for a DVR if I came back. I did not and have no regrets. Digital TV is ok, and we(my kids) only watch PBS. I get all my programming through netflix, hulu, and other online sources. So much better to watch what I want when I want.
Not only are we beyond the times of cable, but the land line is becoming a thing of the past for households. I am running Netflix, and filling the gaps with torrents etc. Only downfall is sports are harder to catch... Something tells me this audience wouldn't mind that though.
But there are a bunch of really old people who can't open a can with one of those, because they can't squeeze anything that tight. Remember, child-safe caps are beyond them. Several companies make little wrenches for their removal for this reason and people even share tips on instructables because it is such a real issue. Some people really need electric can openers if they're going to eat food out of a can. In our society which makes shopping a PITA, we don't shop daily, or (often) take care of our forebears, so the elderly are likely to need preserved foods. (ObDisclaimer: I'm certainly not taking care of my parents, they'd better lay in that Campbell's now. And a sturdy electric can opener, if they can find one.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I cut off Cable and Satalite and don't even bother with internet TV. It's a waste of time - nothing but GARBAGE anymore. I have better things to do with my time than watch the latest lies and decits and BS comming from the MSM.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
I made the change over about 5 years ago when Comcast altered the programming on my cable service and turned my cable modem into a brick effectively by having service problems at least 1/3 of the day that made it impossible for me to work from home since VPN connections don't survive disconnections of service. Screw that! A fast connection doesn't make up for NO connection! My wife and I don't miss it a bit. We are too far out in the boondocks to get decent broadcast service and satellite service is too expensive.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
Here's the deal with me. I don't buy new cars, so those ads are out. I buy used based on years of seeing what is a good ride and what isn't, etc, and shop used from that viewpoint, look for deals. Those "little purple pill" big pharmco ads on the news...doesn't apply. Car insurance I just shop for and get quotes, although I admit I liked the geico geckp commercials..but they didn't make the cut on price. I don't drink although for sure I remember the sludgeweiser frog commercials. Subliminal indoctrination on how they slant the news always towards the government/statist point of view..way over that, decades ago. I have a _strong_ default to take any initial claims by government or big business as lies until overwhelmingly and independently proven otherwise. The more important the issue, the higher the probability they are outright lying. I am an extremist in that regard. So their ads or stealth ads posing as "news" have a reverse reaction to me, if I get any reaction at all.
And...geez..I watch so little of TV, I mean I really don't, not anymore, not for years and years. My GF does some but my back is to the TV and I don't pay any overt attention to it except catch some local news and weather. Occasionally she will bug me to chime in on Jeopardy questions, which I can usually get as long as it isn't silver screen/entertainment or obscure old european literature or whatnot. And right now I can't tell you who sponsors jeopardy lately, so those ads..maybe subliminal but I don't recall them.
I really don't make that much, under ten grand a year, so buying anything brand new is just out almost always, so all those commercials are a waste of time, so I tune them out..as much as possible. Some must slip in, but it doesn't lead to much sales for them all that much. So I will give you some points, sure, it can be hard to ignore, but if you are in a physical position were you really *can't* buy much brand new stuff..makes it a lot easier.
All right, I did think of one ad lately, that lead to me buying something, but with a twist. I have a bad back, goes out severely once in awhile. Last month was one of those times, stuck inside, not much to do, sat and watched some old westerns, an infomercial came on for those gravity inversion hang bed things. Looked interesting...and I was getting real tired of being crippled up and in serious pain....but I didn't buy that brand, I shopped online and read reviews and bought one at one third the price and it works great. I think that's about it for the last several years for being influenced by ads where it actually lead to a sale. Still thinking....that's about it.
I mostly use the net, and run noscript and ABP to speed up pages, my connection is slow and I am not going to wait-literally- five minutes for some page to load, and to avoid possible bad security issues, plus I don't want flash ads seizing up my machine, which they will do I found out. Webmasters build pages now thinking their viewers are all on real high speed connections with real new powerful computers, neither of those attributes apply to me, so I block their ads. So I don't see many ads at all on the net either. I am not *adverse* to ad sponsored at all, but it is a waste of time for those folks, I really probably will not click on one or buy their stuff. If I really need something, I just lookup reviews, and then take those with a grain of salt anyway.
So yes, I think I can be influenced like anyone else, but I go out of my way to not let that happen as well, so perhaps it balances out.
We have directtv, basic with the extra kids and science channels.
Personally, I am ready to no longer have dirrectv, as most things I like, I can find on netflix online.
My kids definitely like watching all the kids and family-friendly shows using netflix online on the wii. It doesn't even need to keep the netflix DVD in the machine, as long as you keep it powered up, so prevents my kids (7yr old and 4yr old) from scratching the disk.
My wife is the reason we still have dirrecttv. She considers her 'science shows' on mummies (yawn) and such as a 'must have.'
All this to say: We are pretty close, as a family, to not needing cable tv or satellite tv, thanks to netflix and the internet.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
I'd be saving about $300/month, as my wife insists on :)
dirrectv and her...
iPhone with all that extra cost of '3G' and a...
gym membership that she rarely uses, but we pay for! (aaargh!)
My only 'luxury costs' are dsl (I guess $50/month?) and netflix (gee a whole $10/month).
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
I watch Stargate Universe on Hulu and some of the Fox cartoons when I feel like it, but those are optional. I watch Southpark on Southparkstudios.com.
Otherwise - TV just sucks.
When I did watch TV I switched between SciFi, the History Channel, Discover, TLC and Cartoon Network.
Now with Miro for my laptop, TED and a couple of other podcast for my iPhone are all I use for myself. There's lots of good nature stuff easily accessible from Miro's default "channels" I'm covered. I don't even want cable anymore.
The only thing I need is a neutral (as in bandwidth and port neutral) ISP with good throughput. I don't think that's available in my area.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Six years ago I duct-taped some coax to a cheese grater and plugged it into my tv. I got four channels from it. Still using it too.
You argued against your OWN point there... You meant to say you love capitalism because it gives you the CHOICE to not spend your money on "crap TV", and when enough people agree with you then there is no money for TV and it inevitably will change to what people want. See the beauty in capitalism? If we were communist/socialist about TV, everything on TV would be controlled by the government because it will be paid for by the government, and you would have no recourse.
REMINDER: You can't have your cake and eat it too.
That's the most underhanded compliment I've read in a long time, well done :)
I gave up on TV when the last Star Trek went off the air, by then I already was using EyeTV to record it for a couple years in High Def.
I don't have time to watch the DVD's I bought why would I pay for something, i.e., cable, that has no value to me.
I get as upset as you when I am shopping for QUALITY items, and made right here, in the USA.
I wonder where Europeans get their items? Germany? If so, then why aren't we! Someone has control over our selection.
I have a SWING-A-WAY manual can opener (USA). My mother had a wall-mount version. My husband would be happy with the USMC version of the P38!
Kathleen
I did some analysis a few months ago and found that 80% of the shows we watch were on the networks. My Verizon FIOS service was reliable and top quality but cost $92/month when you factor in the HD package, converter boxes & cable cards. That 20% of programming definitely wasn't worth $92. I hooked up an outdoor antenna and the past 6 weeks of OTA service have been fantastic. The few shows we miss (NBA on TNT, schlock on Lifetime) can be streamed online, torrented or purchased on DVD at a fraction of the cost. It's still early in my little experiment, but I'm loving it so far!
There's been a ton of responses already, but I'm a little different, so I thought I'd contribute. I have a pretty nice home AV setup from working in the industry for a while, and I ditched Comcast last August when I moved into a new place, and I haven't really missed it. I get all I really want from over-the-air, Hulu and the network sites and in some cases in better quality. The one thing I do miss is digital audio from the Internet sites... but I haven't looked much into whether I can get that or not. The Comcast guide here in the DC area is an antiquated pile of buggy poo and my TV experience is better without it. The HD quality is also much better over the air in 100% unadulterated ASTC. I got a number of comments at the superbowl party I hosted on how good the picture was on my 5 year old mid-range plasma (i.e. not a killer TV, but decent) because people were used to the crappy Comcast HD (which is compressed to go over their network and reconstituted into ASTC by the box at the consumer). Honestly, if FIOS was available here, I'd jump on that bad wagon because a) their HD compression is less aggressive and b) their interface is quite wonderful and adds, not detracts, from the viewing experience. IF Comcast a) got better hardware and improved their interface instead of wasting money on a rebranding campaign (Infinity??? really???) and b) had better up-time in the DC area (the Internet goes wonky most days for some time between 5 and 8pm, I assume due to over-saturation, or when it rained), I'd go back, but I'm not paying $80 a month for sketchy Internet and a 1990-era interface. I don't mind paying for cable (as I did for TimeWarner in Milwaukee), but I do mind paying for something that's actually worse than what I can get for free.
I'm using a 10$ set of bunny ears. 100% signal "quality", according to the EyeTV software. If you're living in the boonies, you would need something better, though.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Windows MCE, Netflix, DVD/HD-DVD/BluRay :-)
Netflix on OSX, Windows, iPad
John Stewart is online.
For "OTA" TV, I just use ABCs internet player.
Ah, speaking of which, there's a new V to watch. When ever I want.