In a recent attempt at frugality I cut my cable TV service to the minimum. Call me, "Mr. Basic Cable." No box, no remote, no DVR. Now it is just the plain old cable coming out of the wall into my set providing a limited number of channels. Even when I had more channels than I could count I found myself only watching a handful. If we could just pick our favorites, and only pay for those, then cable would be providing a more elegant a la carte system. But cable systems don't want that. They'd rather sell the higher profit "packages" they create. Even if they wanted to provide buyer choice, we'd be forced to have some sort of box (or a computer) to select our favorites. A box that would lead to all sorts of up-selling. When I called to cancel my expanded service they instantly offered some services I had paid extra for (DVR) for free. The box is their gateway to higher profits so they don't really like it when you can live without the box.
But (and there is always a really BIG but) human nature being what it is, now that I have returned that box, I am overspending on other items I could live without. As I'm about to walk away from a purchase I hear that little voice saying: "Go ahead, buy it. Look how much you are saving on cable." It is like starving yourself all week long and then pigging out on the weekend. You could eat a lot more wisely every day and be ingesting the same amount of calories for the week.
Ignoring the futility of trying to save money, I am still glad I cut back for other reasons. First of all, I am no longer tethered to the insidious DVR memory vault. Mortgaging my future free time because a pile of TV shows is waiting means I was constantly behind on another chore. Not a positive life choice. How free can you be if you if you have to set aside so much time. I've also noticed that the repetition of less than excellent shows has become increasingly relentless on almost all channels. If low budgets create higher profits then the incentive to offer more low budget material is always going to dominate the schedules.
The more channels and options I had the more I was stuck watching mediocre programming because it was always there waiting for me to choose the least objectionable show. And it was all so easy to record and store. Not having shows stack up in a never ending and never empty que means I now have to watch my favorite show as it airs or hope to catch it later on the Internet. The bonus: Finding shows online running with much shorter commercial breaks. A half hour show is often just 22 minutes and a 60 minute show is sometimes as little as 47 minutes. That is cool.
Having no cable box also means I can't order any Pay Per View movies or special events. Not a significant yearly savings but still no temptation to sit through movies that will eventually be online and cheaper through Netflix. That is another discovery that matters. Netflix is cheap and Hulu is free and both provide easy access to some of my favorites.
Netflix allows unlimited online viewing of many box sets of TV series as well as a wide selection of films. Hooking my laptop up to the TV and using the TV as an external monitor is all I needed to do. No special equipment required. And the quality (downloaded through a minimal wifi connection) is often better than the picture I get on some of my basic cable channels coming out of the wall. Go figure.
Sure, there are fewer options but those things I can't see, I'm learning I can live without.
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