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Cutting the Cord of Cable TV
Today Mr. Rand and I have made the jump. Cut the cord. Dispensed with the services of the local monopoly. Boldly gone where more and more TV watchers are going. We have fired the evil and hated Comcast and decided to rely on a panoply of streaming services which, even collectively, will cost us far less than our ever-growing Comcast bills.
“When in the course of human events” – as they say – something about “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” etc., etc.
So here’s our thinking.
We’ve had Netflix since it was a service that mailed you DVDs, and Amazon Prime since Amazon invented Prime. Though we watch them more and more, and cable less and less, it never before felt quite possible to just do without. There’s live news. There’s sports. There’s a dozen or so channels carried on our cable system that we watch with some regularity. Netflix and Amazon don’t seem to replace all that. Or don’t replace it adequately. So what happened?
The final straw. The coup de grace. The killing shot, was our discovery of Sling TV as an option on our Roku box. A little research showed that it appears to have nearly everything we want from cable, at far less cost. As second homeowners, all the more so. One Sling subscription should theoretically – this is all new to us so that qualifier is important – work at both homes, work on computers and tablets, work on phones, etc. In short, one subscription, for a measly $45/mo. (for one of their most comprehensive packages), should work for both of us, almost anywhere.
No more shelling out $10/mo. per box for the rest of our lives to “rent” each of multiple cable boxes (which must cost about $50/ea. to manufacture). On the box concession alone Comcast has gouged us blind for the last 20 years. We have one old box that’s been sitting here for 13 years. (13 x 12 x $9.95 = $1,552.20. Do you think they made a profit?)
No more opening the cable bill in trepidation wondering whether this is the month they’ll decide to just randomly jack up the bill by 30 bucks. No more calling and pleading for a less extortionate package every three, six, or 12 months. And frankly, no more equipment to break, and need repair, by a guy who gives you a four-hour window to sit at home and wait and then he doesn’t show up until three hours after the window closed (if at all).
It’s a brave new world and we’re diving in. We’ll see how it goes, but it’s hard to imagine the frustrations will be enough to drive us back to where we’ve been. Anybody else cut the cord? What are your experiences?
Published in General
If I could get my English Premier League and Champions League over the internet I would have cut the cord years ago.
Ah, the sweet smell of the phone company, circa 1978.
…
About 15 years ago, a co-worker told me a story. He was helping his mother with her bills, and noticed that the phone company was still charging her $10 a month to rent her a rotary phone. He called them up and canceled the rental. He asked them what they wanted him to do with the phone.
“Just throw it away.”
We did back in 2008. Never looked back. Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Youtube have been dandy, they cost less, and I never watched sports anyway.
My apartment in Japan had a rented rotary pay phone in it. It cost ten yen to make a local phone call… Big and pink…
Who is supplying your broadband?
Our story of cutting the cord:
In 1991, we bought our first home. The hubby ordered Comcast. They wouldn’t give him an accurate time, so he had to take a half a day off. They were late. He was upset. He rescheduled, took another half day off, and they were late again. That is when we went out and bought ourselves a Satellite Dish. This is 1991 mind you. it was not the digital dish. It was “the” dish. We got everything – you name it. We created our own DVR system, wrote custom code to move the dish to the correct coordinates to record stuff while we were not around, etc. etc.
Yep. Not cord people, us.
My parents went this route – I’m guessing you still had to pay the subscription fees to get the signal unscrambled though? My dad spent a year hacking the scramble routine before they made it more rigorous (the early one was a joke and hacked in minutes), and ended up paying the sub fees to get all his channels.
We got and taped a lot of wild feeds. I remember Discovery channel was $5/year. Yeas, we paid for a few channels.
Chicago’s a strong digital broadcast area. Get a TV tuner card/USB tuner ($35-90) that will give you a full selection of better-than-cable quality HD pictures, a click-to-program menu just like cable’s, and the ability to turn a PC, even an old one, into a DVR, all free of any monthly fee. There’s a lot of great stuff on broadcast’s new subchannels (50.1, 50.2, etc).
Someone who’s about to jack up the price for it, I suspect.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/broadband-data-caps-pressure-cord-cutters-1461257846
Wild feeds are broadcasters sending shows to the local stations to tape before they aired. So, essentially, we got to watch stuff before it aired. Yes, hacking some of the encryption wasa breeze.
I dropped off the boxes this morning. What do you think Comcast is going to do with them? I can tell you. Toss ’em. But if I hadn’t dropped them off??? $200 a pop.
I cut the Comcast cord last week. I was finally moved to action when I unplugged the cable and TV for a thunderstorm earlier this spring and it remained unplugged for several weeks. I had decided a while back I wanted to drop it partially because of a few recent stories about the money being contributed to ESPN and their agenda (helps that I have no interest in sports). For a while we hung on because of Fox News but increasingly we found that to be unwatchable and unnecessary with online news.
I put off dropping cable for months because I dreaded making the call after hearing all the stories of bad experiences. I have to say, they must have done their training, because although they bounced me around and tried every type of offer and persuasion to keep me, in the end they were pleasant about it. When I returned the equipment, I was treated equally well and was offered a receipt with serial numbers and was told I would be receiving a credit. So, if you’re putting it off because of the pain of disconnecting, it’s not necessary unless you get a totally different experience than I did.
We have had Netflix for a while, and added Curiosity Stream a few months back. We find ourselves watching a lot of science and history documentaries on that service. Amazon is also used heavily for prime freebies and renting movies.
Always a valid question in these cases.
Sadly, that’s the other half of the equation. I can’t speak for Chicago, but I know around central Ohio there is a hodgepodge of local “last mile” monopolies on the cable, and so at least I’m stuck on that regard.
I had Time Warner and they were equally courteous with me too, but I’ve had friends with Comcast with horror stories. Seems to vary by region.
Sadly, still Comcast. We simply don’t have another adequate option. At least not that I can find. AT&T service is painfully slow. Definitely have our eyes out through. I read recently that Google is thinking about rolling out an over the air service of some kind in Chicago. No idea what it would cost, but reports are that it will blow Comcast away for speed.
We cut the cord years ago. Netflix, Amazon prime, Hulu Plus for streaming. One side effect is that you can take it with you anywhere but you can also share to some extent. In our case my mother just had to have certain basic cable channels at her home. We set her up to share our streaming services and we share her basic cable via a Roku app so we can catch the occasional basic cable offering. Then there is Plex. I have digitized our DVD collection and we watch it on Plex at home and it is made available to my mother and ourselves when away.
Welcome to the brave new world of cord cutters.
We should try that here. Our first step toward cutting the cord was at our house in Michigan, and I had a new HD antenna installed. Unfortunately, up there all we got was one Christian channel from Holland (MI). (Not a shot at Christians. :) Just not what we were hoping for!)
Just the news that Google is coming may cause Comcast to step up their game. In our area TimeWarner upped their band widths to fight off google. We went from 20/2 to 120/20 overnight without a price increase. All because the feared Google is coming.
I’ve read the horror stories too, and even experienced them when I dropped Comcast at the other house. But this time it was pretty easy. The lady said “can I ask you a few questions” and I said “not if they’re the questions intended to get me to change my mind” and she let it go.
I do get the impression the message is starting to get through that their customers aren’t their serfs. But they’ve still got a long way to go, on both the price and the service end, as far as I’m concerned.
Google is apparently backing away from stringing cable. Too expensive.
I had prepared myself to remain calm regardless of what happened, and so I think I would have done OK in any case.
A few years ago, I had a Discover card that kept having charges added for things like identity protection, etc. that I hadn’t asked for. After having them removed only to have them show up again a couple of months later, I decided to drop the account. That was the most unpleasant experience I’ve ever had. As soon as it sounded like I had them convinced to drop the account, they would bounce me to another person, and each time the pressure would escalate. I finally got angry (actually, livid) and told them that I didn’t want to hear anything other than that they were cancelling my account. They accused me of being abusive, and I probably was at that point.
I bought a used Mac Mini which I hooked up to my flatscreen and an amplifier in my living room. It serves as the basis for my home entertainment.
I control it via a bluetooth keyboard with a built-in touchpad. When the battery dies on that thing and I’m too lazy to get up and walk over to the battery charger, I control the computer via an app on my Blackberry.
I watch tv/movies via Netflix, YouTube, Crackle.com, and iTunes.
(Also, there’s the option of using bittorrent, which I would never do because stealing is wrong.)
I listen to music via iTunes.
I play all my favourite old video games via emulators (I have USB adaptors for all my old console gamepads).
I surf the web and also do real, actual work from my sofa. It’s a great set-up for editing video.
I can access it remotely via a SSH server, which I run off an old laptop. I could just run the SSH server on the Mac Mini itself, but I like the extra layer of security provided by having the server on a separate device.
If I really want to watch some live tv, I have a good set of rabbit ears which pulls the HD signal out of the air just fine. I almost never have to, tho’.
My connection is from a non-profit ISP that sells broadband at cost.
Yes, that was the point of the thing I read. Burying last mile fiber does cost a fortune. But they’re apparently looking at testing some kind of new non-wired system.
Infrastructure is a bear. I’ve read a lot of estimates on per mile costs of laying in fiber optics. Some estimates are as low as $1k per home to $4k.
More sparsely populated areas can run those costs up to $9k per home passed.
AT&T takes everything into neighborhood nodes and then breaks it from there using copper coax.
Of course, your government is about to declare broadband a “right.” So be prepared for costs to skyrocket.
Cut the cord back in 2009 during the downturn — business was very bad that year. Revived and upgraded an old MythTV install for modern over-the-air digital TV, added Hulu Plus for a few gaps the family wanted filled, and haven’t looked back. I pay $25/year for a subscription to scheduling data.
This discussion sent me googling for info on Google’s internet service. Look at this.
I’ve been through that with credit cards too. When did it become alright to harass the hell out of people who were just trying to cancel a service they didn’t want?
And you’re better off for it!
But does it work with septic systems?