The TV Situation

Jarrod and I have been tossing about the idea of dumping our satellite TV for a while now; almost to the point where some may be asking 'Why don't you just get it OVER with already!?'

Well, we have finally made a decision on our TV situation. And...

We are going to officially "cut the cord" and no longer have TV on December 1st.

We did a two-week trial of living without TV, which started four-ish weeks ago. The rules were:

• you can only watch local channels (as it would be if we had an antenna)
• you can't record anything to the DVR
• you can't pause the TV
• but you can watch things already on the DVR, which would be like a streaming service

The first week was a little difficult, for me at least. Jarrod would have ditched satellite a long time ago if it was up to him. But I knew part of it was just a mental thing, really. Since I knew I still had the channels there, I just couldn't watch them, it was playing games with my brain; you always want what you can't have—just like really wanting a big hamburger on Fridays during Lent. But by week two, I had gotten used to barely watching local channels, watching a lot more Netflix, and kind of forgot all those other channels were even there. And I didn't care. 

Our satellite auto-billed, so with this month already being paid for, I'm not going to try to cancel mid-month and argue with them to refund me my money. Plus, this way we get a little more time to watch a few things stored on the DVR and time for Jarrod to build an antenna. 

We will be canceling in 11 days. And hopefully we'll never look back. 

I honestly doubt we will. While we "didn't have TV" I would watch things on Netflix. And the things I was watching were shows or movies I actually wanted to watch, instead of just whatever was on the channels. Because the sad truth is that, even though I could hypothetically do this anyways, while still keeping my satellite, the satellite is like the default. It just becomes habit: When I turn on the TV, I turn on the satellite and try to find something to watch. I usually just watch something, even if it's not that great, because it's right there and it's what's in front of me. Without that option, I immediately turn to Netflix instead, where I have all kinds of things queued up that interest me. On top of that, I swear that ever since we made this decision, more often there is nothing on TV that I even want to watch. And I end up turning it off anyways. Why am I paying for this?

I've found out that more people our age have this kind of setup than I originally thought. And it's common with my generation: no TV, just watch online. With the announcements of HBO and CBS creating their own streaming services, I think more channels are going to follow suit and the traditional definition of TV is going to change fairly soon. That's not to say television as we know it is dead, because there are still many reasons for some people to keep their cable, like watching live sports games, lacking a good internet connection, or just preferring the convenience of it.

But as more and more people like us "cut the cord" the networks are going to be scrambling for that lost advertising money and it's going to be exactly like the newspapers—which also means that it is going to take them a long time to figure out a workable model for this.

Somewhere back in the early 2000s, newspapers started to realize 'Hey, we're losing print subscribers, everyone's online, but they don't pay for what they read online... why are we giving away all of our news for free?' And then around 2010-2011 you started to see paywalls popping up. I predict a near-identical outcome for the big TV companies. The difference is that the networks can at least place ad-rolls on the videos, and those aren't that different from having commercials during shows in the traditional sense. For newspapers, an online ad is not a print ad and never will be a print ad, and online ad revenue rarely makes up for lost print ad revenue. But I predict that in the future, most every cable channel will either come up with their own streaming service, place everything behind a paywall in some form—either a "hard paywall" where you pay for all or nothing or what is called a "soft paywall" or a "pay screen" (like a screen door) where you get some episodes free, after that you have to pay—or they are going to place even more ads on the videos. 

On a random note: Hey remember YouTube before it had ads? Oh... those were the days...

So why are we doing all this? Well, for a few reasons:

• To save money—Even if we signed up for both Hulu Plus and Amazon Prime for streaming more movies and shows, we still save about $400-500 a year. We can put that towards things we'd enjoy way more than our crappy TV channels we barely even watch.
• To spend time in other ways—For me, I hope that I will spend less time in front of the screen and more time doing other things I enjoy, like reading or crocheting. Or once we move the treadmill downstairs, I can play the piano again. 
• Less frustration—I've touched on this one before, but TV really frustrates me in 2 ways. 
• 1. It is really frustrating to look through all of your 100+ channels and see that there is NOTHING on there that sounds remotely appealing. Now I won't have that problem. Yes, I expect there will be times I can't find anything on Netflix either, but so far I have not had that problem. If anything, I've had the opposite of having too many things that I can't keep up.
• 2. The stupidity of TV, in commercials and in shows. Almost any new reality show that has been introduced in the past 3 years is a regurgitation of some other kind of show. For example: Deadliest Catch was almost 10 years ago, and there have been a ton of other 'obscure careers that you didn't know were fascinating until now' shows. And then, of course, in 2012 we hit the bottom of the barrel with Honey Boo Boo. Because sadly, America likes to watch train wrecks. With the exception of Swamp People, haha, I just can't bring myself to watch this stuff. It just doesn't interest me in the least. So now I don't even need to worry about it, I won't even know it exists, so I won't have anything to be frustrated about. And as far as commercials, Netflix and Prime don't even have them, and Hulu only plays a fraction of the ads you deal with normally. 

So it's se la vie to TV in less than two weeks! If you're interested in switching to the dark side with us, feel free to message me. We did a lot of research while making this decision, I'd be happy to share what we found out.