We Cut The Cable

Posted June 22, 2018

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Two weeks ago, Lisa and I cut the cable.

It was not, I have to admit, a decision that was reached without some degree of anxiety.  We had, after all, been on cable for, well, since they put cable into the NY area.  A long time.

And even though we were getting some 2,000 channels, we found we were watchnig maybe 5 of them? Maybe.  

When we got the Samsung smart TV, that made the change. Suddenly, we were online more than we were on cable, and so easy. The days of routing our Mac through the TV monitor and screwing around with all the URLs,m were over and we thought this might be possible.

The fact that Spectrum (which used to be Time/Warner which will soon be ATT), was offering all the local stations plus any 10 cable channels of our choice for $20 a month was too good to pass up. We had been used to spending $200 a month for cable.  So we did it.

And, to get to the bottom line, it works great.

Seamless.

And I don't for a second miss any of those other 1990 channels that I never watched anyway.

But here's the really interesting thing - two weeks into our little experiment - we are spending a lot of time watching ... YouTube!

Not cats in trees...

Or funny videos...

But there are a TON of UK and BBC shows on YouTube, from Countryfile to Escape To The Country - which we watch in the UK and now can get here on YouTube - and there are so many of them. As Lisa says, more than Law and Order Reruns.

Of course, not everyone wants to watch Countryfile (though I cannot imagine wny not), but of course, that is but a tiny tip of the online iceberg.

Now, this morning I read that ATT is about to offer a competitor to Spectrum's nonlinear TV service called (creatively), TV Watch, and for $15 a month. This makes it the cheapest of the online TV services, undercutting Philips $16/month.

What does this bode for cable?

If I were you, I would sell my stock in Discovery.

Does not look very good for conventional linear appointment view cable TV. 

But they had a good run.

Now, back to the show.

(Look! Lambing Live!)