While we were on our trip in May, we watched almost no television.
While we’ve watched a bit more television since we got home, for me it’s been primarily limited to a half hour of local news and a half hour of national news in the evening. Karen watches a little bit more, but she’s not even watching her one soap on a daily basis.
We’ve had satellite television forever, it seems. We bought one of those big systems back in the 80s back when everything could be snatched out of the air for free.
Whenever it’s been available, we’ve always had premium movie networks, starting the first time we had cable TV.
The reason we went with satellite way-back-when was that cable was not available where we live and wouldn’t be “for a long time, if ever.”
The movie package we had for a long time was HBO/Cinemax. Then, a couple of years ago, we went with “all” available premium movie channels, and, then later dropped HBO/Cinemax. But we still had all of the rest — and we had the maximum package of other channels, over 250, most of which don’t have anything on that we’d be interested in, if we were interested in watching TV.
With our current viewing habits, that just doesn’t make sense, does it?
During the period of time that we had all of the movie channels, I recorded quite a few movies and most of them have yet to be watched. If we want to watch a movie, we have plenty to watch — or we can just rent one.
Time that we used to spend watching television is now used for other things.
It only made sense to stop wasting money on something we don’t use. We don’t get network TV here without the satellite receiver, so we needed to maintain at least minimum service.
Earlier in the week, I canceled all of our premium movie channels and dropped the number of channels we get from over 250 to just over 100.
It cut the monthly bill in half.
I guess it’s something we should have done long ago. Maybe we need to check to see if they “ever” brought cable out our way.
Do you have cable or satellite TV? If so, do you use all of the services that you are paying for?
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We had cable for about a year…just the bare minimum so we could watch the local weather and our PBS station reliably. It was only $10 a month, but then they decided the minimum package would cost a lot more so we dropped it. At the moment I watch a lot of Netflix movies while I use my NordicTrack treadmill. That works just fine.
A smart move. We have the basic cable plan. We hardly ever watch TV anyway.
.-= Vered – MomGrind´s last blog ..10 Ways To Hate Yourself As A Woman =-.
It is compulsory that our cable TV service provider installs a set top box which digitalizes all that they provide and theoretically, they are supposed to charge only for those channels that we see. It is however too complicated and so we pay a flat monthly fee and can access about 200 channels. My father now watches about four channels and I hardly ever.
I bundled my phone, cable, and internet service. That reduced my monthly service bill on all three by half, and we ended up with more channels than we could ever use.
.-= Turf Dad´s last blog ..Wednesday Weigh In Week 26 =-.
Jean,
Down the road, that may be where we end up. However, going to the minimum is a big savings.
Vered,
It’s amazing how many people actually watch little TV.
Ramana,
There’s been some rumors about eventually making cable and satellite television providers have menu where just the channels you want could be ordered à la cart fashion. I doubt we will ever see anything like that — and, if we did, a lot of the marginal stations would go under.
Turf Dad,
Bundling phone, cable, and internet might be an option, but, since we will have cell phones anyway, we’re likely to go with something where we can drop out land-line phone service. We may check out cable sometime down the road.
I watch a lot of TV, but when it comes to movies I prefer to rent rather than watch what they show on TV, which I’ve probably already seen. A while back I cut it back to the second most basic service. (The absolutely most basic service just gives the four major networks and a few township-sponsored channels.) I can’t remember what the financial crunch was at the time, but I’ve never felt the need to increase the service.
Since I rarely make phone calls, I cut my phone service down to “economy,” a service which you actually have to ask for, because it’s not advertised. I combined that with a DSL service at a low price. Now my basic cable, super-basic phone and regular DSL add up to less than the $99 they’re advertising for getting all three from the same provider.
Dot – Since the storms last week, all we’ve been able to get are the local stations and a few more over the dish. I need to go and repoint the dish, but have not had much motivation to do that. It took us three days to discover that we weren’t getting everything that is in our basic service. We may just have to check and see if our over-the-air reception is any better now that the locals have all gone digital. It may be that we can go without dish network completely.
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