In the last few months, I’ve become more and more disgruntled with my cable service. The cost is high and I simply don’t watch enough television to justify the price. The video quality is poor and the DVR makes me not want to watch television. The selection of video on demand and movies on the “movie” channels are so poor that we also subscribe to Netflix to supplement our entertainment “needs.”
I looked hard at our television viewing habits and realized that most of the tv programming we watch is freely available over the air. There are some exceptions but by and large our “regularly scheduled programming” comes from the big networks. The value proposition is just not there.
While we do receive HD signals from our provider and that provider is increasing the amount of HD channels on the network, by and large, HD content comes from the major networks. Standard definition, or SD content is so compressed, legitimate download sources are starting to look better.
Crappy picture, lack of selection and high costs leave me with two options.
- I could sit and complain about it.
- Or, I could ditch cable.
Given all that, we decided to ditch cable and launch this blog to tell you about it.
If you’d like to know more about my little experiment, head on over to Ditching Cable, where I’ll be showing folks how easy it is to get rid of your cable subscription. It’s a little raw right now, but I’ll be spending some of my time fixing it up in the next few weeks.
Haven’t been paying too much attention to our pals over at XM lately, so here is a little update. After a little tiff with Clear Channel about adding advertisements to their channels (CC provides programming to several XM channels), XM decided to add genre channels that match the CC provided channels. 