cord cutting

We entertain the notion of ditching cable on a pretty regular basis. We just haven't committed yet. Forbes says that 33 million households ditched cable last year. Mostly, I would guess, because the're unhappy with cable pricing. Oh, and younger people don't watch traditional TV. I used to work in the cable industry. Here are some things I learned; the cable company has been talking about ala cart pricing for decades. While the consumer finds that very appealing, the cable company doesn't always have a choice on what networks they want to and can broadcast. for instance, the cable company wants to provide you with HGTV.  Discovery Inc. owns HGTV and they say, sure, we'll give you the rights to broadcast HGTV but you also have to broadcast Velocity, OWN, Food Network, TLC, etc. Now the cable company has to pay the fee for allll of those instead of just HGTV.

I think cable gets a bad rap sometimes. They're essentially just the middleman. But I get tired of paying for cable for a few reasons...One is that you can get all the network channels for free, with an antenna. Another is that there are a 1000 channels with very little on that the average viewer is watching. And the ADS!!! Holy crap! A one hour television show has 22 minutes of ads! And how about when they take 3 hours to broadcast a 90 minute movie?? Ugh. Lastly, I hate all those insignificant channels they're forced to give you. You know the ones...they show the same movie 3 times a day for 2 weeks. They have to do that because they don't have enough programming to fill 24 hours. And how many news channels do they think we need? There are about 30 of them right now. It's so ridiculous.

More isn't always better. Sometimes it's just more.