I recently made a bold decision to get rid of digital cable (and the super-duper-every-channel package) in favor of just plain old basic cable. In consequence of that decision, today I get to experience one of the fun little frustrations of modern life: waiting for the cable guy to come during some arbitrary time block picked by the evil cable company.
His task is an arduous one for which I'm sure he must have been specially trained. He must retrieve the sacred digital box and the holy remote control. He must then carefully present me with paperwork. For this service, the cable company will be handsomely rewarded with $15 from my bank account. That's right - I have to pay them to send out an installer (or would that be "uninstaller"?) to pick up a box that I would have happily returned to them myself if they would only let me. What a rip off! But then, who could ever accuse a telecommunications company of being reasonable?
Our decision to downgrade really raised the ire of my daughter, who commented on it in her blog today. Her comments bring up several interesting points.
First, the cable companies are, in fact, evil. They have a monopolistic choke-hold on the programming, and along with the Satellite companies (if you even have that option) they are flexing that monopoly to force their customers to buy more expensive programming packages than they want or need. I mean really, why should I have to pay for 160 channels just to get 5 that I might watch? Why can't I just pay for the channels I want? (Incidentally, those would be CNN, Comedy Central, the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, and HBO [if only for The Sopranos and Rome].)
Maybe if they didn't force me to take all those channels just to get a handful of shows, my bill wouldn't be $130 a month. But then, that's the whole point of their programming model. By downgrading, I'll be saving $65 a month (I'm keeping the broadband) - that's $780 a year! I can think of a lot better things to do with that money than pay for a signal I only watch 20 minutes a day over my morning coffee; which brings me to my next point.
I've noticed since I've been home from Philadelphia that we really don't watch much TV anyway. In point of fact, that's not a bad thing. In the United States, an awful lot of time is wasted in front of the "idiot box". Unfortunately, it has become ingrained in our culture, but apart from the time that wasted, I prefer not to have my opinion spoon-fed to me like pablum.
Once, when I was a child, we lived in a very remote little town in Montana where we didn't even get a TV signal. Our only telephone was on a party line that we shared with 6 other families (picture 7 families all wired to the same phone line) . Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was no cable TV in town, and this was before advent of Digital Satellite systems. The net result? When Christmas came, we didn't really know what to ask for. I think I wanted a pair of gloves or something that year. We simply hadn't been bombarded with advertising to tell us what we wanted.
So to my daughter and the evil cable company I say, "Life with less TV will be a good thing."
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1 comment:
I too downgraded from digital, about 6 months ago. At one point, I didn't even have the premium channels, just basic cable on a digital box. I was paying $14 just to have menu control and on demand. So I installed Windows Media Center 2005 on my PC (+ TV card) and viola, menus and on demand (well sort of).
I was fortunate in that I did not have to pay to downgrade, but did have to take the digital box back.
I have recently switch my Internet from cable to FIOS, and as soon as IP TV comes to my area the cable company will loose my analog cable business too.
My only concern is that the government wants to rid analogue cable in the US for the future. Hopefully the government won't let cable companies rip off their customers by making them pay for premium services to just have reception. However, if IP TV does take off, then the cable companies may have to rethink their prices.
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