do you love your cable?greenspun.com : LUSENET : Squishy : One Thread |
Do you have cable? Do you think you pay too much for it? How many of your channels do you watch, and which ones do you just flip right by?Don't you wish we could just select the cable channels we wanted and order them on a channel by channel basis?
I feel that fifteen dollars of my money a year for the past fifteen years is going to The Nashville Network and I want it to stop.
When did you first get cable? Does anyone have M2?
-- Anonymous, July 22, 1999
I don't have cable because I work for a cable and satellite TV company and know just how dreadful the majority of the programmes are. I could even get it for free, but I just can't be bothered. The only reason I'd ever get it is for sport.You can actually select channels on an individual basis over here. Basically, if a cable company makes you buy lots of cruddy channels just so you can see the ones you like, it's called bundling. We now have a situation called unbundling (I don't know who thought up this complicated jargon!), which means you can just pick and choose.
It's cool for the consumer but it makes it difficult for the TV channels - if you produce a new channel and everybody can't just automatically access it, how are people going to get to see it and find out whether they like it? It does make TV channels work harder on their marketing and content though.
-- Anonymous, July 22, 1999
uh... I have 'basic cable.' Not the very basic, but the cable that comes with Nick at Night, FX, Family channel, Lifetime, Sci-Fi and the likes. Just no movie channels.We had a free preview of Showtime this past weekend.
My wife turned to me at about 3:30 pm, on Saturday afternoon, flush, a bit of sweat on her brow, carrying an armfull of laundry as the dog stood in her way, waiting to trip her and the boy wrapped his arms around her leg...
"We are never getting movie channels."
The movie with Jodie Foster as the mother of some child prodigy was on, so I wasn't really paying much attention to the comment until it sunk in a half hour later, as the credits were rolling.
My wife was in the other room by this time but I yelled out to her 'Honey.. why can't we order HBO?'
-rich http://www.inferiority.com
-- Anonymous, July 22, 1999
No, I most certainly do NOT love my cable-- actually, I've been complaining about it for the past week and a half in Jernal, and I'm pretty sure that if something doesn't happen with it soon, my readers are going to kill me, just to shut me up about it. See, I have TCI. They've been working on upgrading the cable system for the past three or four months, and I was getting excited, because I'd finally be getting E! (after John Henson left Talk Soup, but still cool nontheless), Comedy Central, and the Cartoon Network. About a month ago, we got another thing in the mail that said that they would be upgrading the service in our neighborhood the week of July 12th. And here we are, the week after the twelfth, and we still have nothing.I guess it's a petty thing to get aggrivated over, but for God's sake, I've been waiting for these channels for years! As pathetic as that is, I've been waiting for these channels for years!
-- Anonymous, July 22, 1999
I am soooo pathetic. Hear my tale of woe, Pamie (by the way, I think you're totally in the right on the Xeney thing. I read her entry -- what the hell was she thinking? All Tae Bo-ers know that you don't keep your pet in the room when you're in Deep Blanks Mode. I leave my cat in the room, but that's only because I want to kick her. Fool.)Anyway, I pay an obscene amount for my cable. I mean, I physically get ill when I think about it. The thing is, I have my Roadrunner service bundled with it (you should look into it -- it kicks ass), so it looks much worse than it is. But here's the breakdown:
Road Runner: Like $45 a month. That includes ISP service too, and I got rid of my home phone to balance it out (I have a cell phone and just use that now. Don't get me started on that. I just got a cell phone bill of $180, mostly for f*&(ing local calls)
Digital cable: I've got the digital package plus the HBO/Cinemax combo. Shouldn't cost ALL that much, right?
Okay, so how the hell is my cable bill $121 A MONTH!?!!? Have I lost my MIND?!?! What the hell!?! I can't afford this!
The way I used to rationalize it was this: I used to live in an apartment with free basic cable. So I added the digital/HBO combo and it was only like $20 a month. I thought,"hey, I can afford this." Then I moved to a duplex, but it was too late. I was addicted to the digital. See, Pamie, that's how they getcha! Time Warner is evil, much more evil than puppy abusers. Remember what I said about all the good TV that's out there? Those were the rambling of a fool trying to justify his foolish spending on foolish television. It's all very foolish if you ask me.
The foolish,
omar
-- Anonymous, July 22, 1999
I just got digital cable as well.Oh... My... God!!!
I love it! The Game Show Network is the greatest channel in existence. I cannot stop watching it! I'm watching it right now! They have all these awesome old shows that I haven't seen in years. Who doesn't like the Gong Show, I mean really! I want to live in Game Show land. Guessing prices... Winning prizes... Family bonding. The 95 movie channels I have now are pretty cool, too. I also WATCH the music channels. I sit there and look at who's playing and what CD I can get their song from. Pitiful. This infernal box is ruining my life.
-- Anonymous, July 22, 1999
I have the worst cable ever. They replaced MTV with the Lifetime channel. And Turner classic movies was replaced with our fifth installment of CNN Headline News. One is enough, right? They are exactly the same channel. And who doesn't have Lifetime in the first place?
-- Anonymous, July 23, 1999
I have to agree with Chuy. I got up at 8:00am so that the cable guy could come fix my new digital cable. Well I just called in sick for work so that I could watch the Game Show Net. My boss said no.
-- Anonymous, July 23, 1999
I went through a period of no television. Well, I had a small b&w set that picked up the four local stations (Binghamton, NY) so what more could I need... then I moved far enough out of town that I only got one station... then the sound went out on the tv and I never bothered to get it fixed, not even when I moved back into town, so I spent at least two years without any television. Then my father-in- law gave us an old non-functioning color set that was in his garage. Spent seventy bucks or so to get it fixed... and then got cable... with HBO. We enjoyed it. Didn't watch much tv but it was nice to be able to sit back and watch a movie on HBO. Then HBO went to 24 hours a day and it seemed that all the movies I wanted to see were on at 3 a.m and when I had the time to watch there was nothing on that I wanted to see... so we dumped cable... But we still had four local channels to watch, so we had CBS & ABC & NBC & PBS. No cost.Then came chidren followed by a videocamera and VCR. Now we could tape programs to watch at our convenience, but you can't do that very well when your tv is using rabbit ears. Then one day the cable company has a special offer -- free installation and a very low monthly rate for "basic" service (which was 11 or 12 stations). For several years we paid $3.95 a month for that basic service. Then they raised it to five or six dollars but added more channels.
Sigh... and then we moved to Rhode Island... and the kids (entering their teens) wanted full cable with everything... I didn't want any of the premium services, but I did like the news channels and the weather channel and... so we made a deal... If they would assume responsibility for making their own lunches to take to school (thus releaving me of the burden -- I'm the preparer of food in this house) I would go for the big bunndle of cable channels... dozens of them... for like thirty bucks a month or so... (Okay so maybe they get hungry some days because they have not bothered to make a lunch... or they persuade me to fix them something anyway)
But I have another child ("child"? He will be thirty-one in the fall) who gave us a family Christmas present -- a year's supply of HBO. HBO on this cable system is two channels, regular HBO and HBO plus... Now I am hooked on The Sopranos, etc.
And finally they have cable internet access available in my area... $150 installation (except when they have a $70 off sale) plus a monthly charge (about $30 if you buy a cable modem and $45 if you lease one from them)... If I go with cable then not only do I get a faster (and more reliable) connection, I can dump my ISP, thus saving $19.95 a month... and maybe even dumping the extra phone line, thus saving whatever that thing costs (but with two teenagers in the house an extra phone line comes in handy). But all my wife sees is what the total cable bill would be each month...
Right now I get maybe seventy channels or so... never counted them all... but I rarely watch TV... Oh, yeah, Sopranos of course, maybe Oz plus maybe a movie or two during the course of a month. The weather channel if there is a storm coming. Maybe one of the news channels if something important is going on. My wife and I sometimes watch the House & Garden channel... The kids watch Comedy Central and SciFi Channel and Cartoon Network... and my son loves Discovery Channel and History Channel and I'll watch a bit with him (but not too much because he is a channel surfer and I can only take so much of that)...
If it weren't for the kids... what I would like to have is about five channels and I'd be glad to pay a couple bucks a month for each of them and that's it... And I'm not sure about that... The other night I wanted to watch the space shuttle launch, set for about twenty minutes past midnight... There was no coverage! Yes, I know they cancelled the launch, but that was less than a minute before launch. I went to MSNBC and CNBC and CNN and.... every damned one of them was doing JFK Jr stuff... Hey, he'd been dead for three days at that point, it wasn't news anymore, just damned tabloid tv...
Come to think of it, I could probably pick four or five stations with rabbit ears... save a fortune...
-- Anonymous, July 23, 1999