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400,000 American Homes Have Dumped Pay TV This Year
redkemper writes "More than 400,000 American homes have cut the cord and ditched their cable and satellite pay-TV services since the start of 2012. The figure includes 169,000 subscribers shed by Time Warner Cable last quarter, marking the service provider's tenth consecutive quarter of customer losses. It also includes the 52,000 net subscribers DirecTV lost this past quarter, and 176,000 customers who left Comcast."
I was coming home and watching 4+ hours of CSI every evening. It was easy to veg out to. It was mildly interesting, mildly entertaining, and required minimal thought or engagement to pay attention to. I also watched The History Channel, The Discovery Channel, and the various movie channels like TCM and AMC.
One day I realized I was neglecting my wife, my hobbies, my chores around the house, etc. We got rid of pay cable when Turner Classic Movies was taken off of extended analog and put on to digital, which was one of the few networks that we actually cared to specifically watch.
We went without pay TV for years, and bought our DTV decoder boxes like everyone else, and I rediscovered many of the actually good vintage shows on RTN and Me and other networks. Just recently I started playing with XBMC, and I wholly recommend it. I threw together a junk PC from parts laying around and hooked it into the component inputs on our widescreen HD tube TV, and now we can watch hundreds of "channels" worth of free content from PBS, several cable networks, Vimeo, Youtube, and lots and lots of other sources. They seem to be without commercials too.
Now we can watch what we want, when we want, and can pursue our hobbies without having to interrupt just to watch a stupid TV show.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I dropped Cable over the AMC fight and haven't looked back. Frustrated that I'll have to wait to see Game of Thrones and Walking Dead but maybe this latest debacle will force the content providers to sell streaming services like HBO Go. The joke is Netflix streaming doesn't carry much current content but they have a ton of older stuff and they are adding faster than I can consume so at this rate I'll never run out. I mostly let it run while I work for white noise anyway. It's got the added benefit of no annoying commercials. It's why I stopped watching CNN, their ratio of news to commercials is 50/50. Completely obscene.