More and more, I’m becoming less interested in a cable television feed at my house. I’ve told myself I’m going to cancel it a hundred times, but I never get around to it. Plus, I’m getting a decent deal with my Comcast package, and I have my bedroom Tivo hooked up, where I watch Seinfeld and whatever the Tivo recommends for me occassionally — usually stuff like Planet Earth or The Universe or some old Sherlock Holmes dramas.
What’s always interesting though is how I actually use cable. I pretty much use it the same way as my media library, in that I’ll switch my TV input over to the Tivo to watch a show that I know will be available on it that it records regularly. Or, and this is the main reason I like the Tivo, is for the suggestions. I know that nearly all the stuff it recommends for me and records automatically I’ll at least have a passing interest in, and if there’s nothing to watch, then there’ll be something to fall back on in there. But this is what I never ever do anymore — just channel surf.
The whole idea of just seeing what’s randomly showing on TV whenever I decide to sit down seems so archaic to me. I mean, it’s totally random. This really hit home to me this weekend. In my living room I have an HD Tivo which I hardly ever use. In fact, I haven’t even watched cable TV on it for so long, that I had unplugged the actual coaxial cable from the wall to my set so long ago, that I couldn’t even remember the last time it was plugged in. I only had to set it up because I wanted to watch the LDS General Conference (my sister’s blog has a good layman description, better than I could come up with of what it is).
Well, I plugged my cable back in late Friday night while I was waiting for my brother to arrive at the airport. I had some time to kill, so I just started flipping through the channels to see what I was missing. My HD Tivo has a Cable Card in there, so I can pick up all the encrypted channels and stuff, and my package gives me like 100 channels or so. I have no idea how many it really is. But I remembered another reason I wanted to get rid of cable — there is some really weird crap on. Granted, it was something like midnight on a Friday, so there couldn’t really be that much interesting stuff on, but still. The whole idea of just checking to see if there’s something interesting on *right now* just seems so dumb to me.
I’m sure I’ll eventually cancel cable and just watch stuff from my library … but the only thing holding me back is that every now and then, I do like the randomness of just finding something. But, that randomness is best served by interests I’ve already subscribed to, which the Tivo does really well. I kinda wish the cable industry would catch up with the rest of the way content is being served and delivered. I’m tired of things the way they are. Ah well, in a few years, I suppose.
The only reason they are hanging on is because there does not exist a good stand alone internet provider. In my area, Comcast provides a 15 dollar discount on internet if you have basic cable ($13/month). Likewise, DSL is expensive if you don’t have a phone line, which I don’t want/need. rip-off all around.
Oh yah, I keep forgetting about that. The very basic cable package is something like $12/mo, and Comcast gives you $10/mo off your Internet package if you subscribe to any cable plan, so it comes out to $2/mo for basic cable. Not a bad deal, really.