Saturday
Feb282009
Life Without Cable… Sort Of
Saturday, February 28, 2009 at 10:52AM
Update: As of yesterday (March 4) our cable is officially disconnected. Sad times. Only over the air channels and the bevy of entertainment offered by Hulu… I think we'll survive.
Yesterday I did the unthinkable: cancelled our cable.
Shocking, right? I love television and everything, but I felt we were paying a great deal of money for High Definition cable service and not getting what we were paying for. The signal wasn't bad, but at times the audio didn't line up with the video (ABC especially) which became painful to watch. Not only that, but the supplied DVR was just awful. It sometimes dropped sound for a second, would mess up recordings, and would also get so bogged down that you would press a button two or three times and nothing would happen, only to find the commands finally go through 30 seconds later and the DVR to start going crazy.
With all of these reasons in mind, I called the cable provider and requested for our cable television service to be disconnected. After trying to retain our services with offers, they obliged. They requested that I take the DVR box back to the office though (which is fine). So I disconnected the box, collected the power cable and remote controller and delivered the system to their office. All in all, it was a pretty straight forward and (mostly) painless procedure.
In the title, I say, "Sort of" because we still have basic cable showing up in our apartment as of this writing. I can only hope that we still don't get charged for it, or else I'll be spending another twenty minutes of my life on hold to try and cancel our cable… again.
Yesterday I did the unthinkable: cancelled our cable.
Shocking, right? I love television and everything, but I felt we were paying a great deal of money for High Definition cable service and not getting what we were paying for. The signal wasn't bad, but at times the audio didn't line up with the video (ABC especially) which became painful to watch. Not only that, but the supplied DVR was just awful. It sometimes dropped sound for a second, would mess up recordings, and would also get so bogged down that you would press a button two or three times and nothing would happen, only to find the commands finally go through 30 seconds later and the DVR to start going crazy.
With all of these reasons in mind, I called the cable provider and requested for our cable television service to be disconnected. After trying to retain our services with offers, they obliged. They requested that I take the DVR box back to the office though (which is fine). So I disconnected the box, collected the power cable and remote controller and delivered the system to their office. All in all, it was a pretty straight forward and (mostly) painless procedure.
In the title, I say, "Sort of" because we still have basic cable showing up in our apartment as of this writing. I can only hope that we still don't get charged for it, or else I'll be spending another twenty minutes of my life on hold to try and cancel our cable… again.
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