Cable - Why would I pay for this crap?

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westo2

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We got rid of cable/satellite about 3 years ago now - I've been traveling a whole bunch this year, including a three week stint now where I've got access to cable at the hotel.

I used to enjoy the History Channel, Discovery Channel and the like - it's now entirely crappy whiny motorcycle builders yelling at each other or pawn dealers who are bad actors working an obviously staged situation.

I have never regretted killing the cable, but this has certainly reinforced the decision.


A quick calculation shows that I've got north of $3k in savings over that time too - now THAT's a lot of brew gear.

:mug:
 
the cooking shows are good,I am always hungry

I can eat a giant meal and have to avoid the food shows because it will cause my stomach to rumble...

And speaking of always being hungry... The Walking Dead is back on AMC in a few weeks :mug:

Yeah but when is season 2 going to be on netflix? That is what I want to know.
 
Ditching cable is money well not spent. Agreed. I do miss cooking shows, and ease of show selection. Other than that, don't miss it much.
 
I'm going on two years without cable or satellite. We have Netflix and some friends of ours let us use their HBOgo app to watch what we can. I absolutely can't imagine how I convinced myself to spend that amount of money for absolutely crap programming. Honestly, the only thing I miss is sports. I wish there were a way to get ESPN and maybe Fox sports so I can keep up with football, hockey and baseball without going to a bar or a buddy's house.
 
I haven't had cable for almost 10 years. I used to miss watching drag racing and college basketball, but I can get that through my Xbox now. Most of TV is junk.
 
Most TV is utter ****e. I'd like to kick the entire cast and writers of The Big Bang Theory in the groin. This stuff is written for the lowest common denominator.

It makes me sad that so many people spend their time watching this stuff. On-demand TV has made it even worse. There is a radio ad where a couple talks about how nice it is to enjoy the great outdoors. After an uncomfortable pause, they both grab their laptops. It's so depressing.

I do like some TV: the Sopranos is the best written show I've ever seen. There are a few other really great programs out there. But do yourself a favor, don't waste your life watching some pointless garbage like Bones or Modern Family.
 
I ditched cable/satelite about 2 years ago and put up a digital antenna. I'm putting over $100 a month back in my pocket.
I get all the major networks and a whole bunch of local broadcast.
Now if it's broadcast in hi-def I get hi-def without paying extra for it.
I streem HULU Plus and have more tv than I care to watch, and that includes football. Both college and pros.
 
I've been without cable for about 6 years. Never regretted it.

Tried the digital antenna but I didn't get good reception.

I used to just buy everything on DVD.
I recently got a Roku and can stream netflicks and Pandora through it. I love it! Highly recommend it.

Most tv is just crap anymore. It's all reality shows. If I want to watch sports I'll go to a bar.
 
The problem is you cannot get a la carte channels. If I could get ESPN, ESPN2, Big 10 Network, Versus, ABC, FOX, NBC, Food Network, Travel Channel, AMC, HBO, and Showtime, I WOULD. But guess what? I have to pay up the wazoo to have an extra 250 channels that I'll never watch. I'd rather just not have TV and go out to watch games on the weekends. UGH.
 
I spend way too much money on directv every month but until I can find a reliable quality and live solution to watching sports I am stuck. Its sad too because that is the only time the DTV box even gets turned on.
 
I don't do sports, at all. I rarely watch the cooking shows but, Roku has stepped up their game on cooking "channels" lately. I check the weather online, and get my news from the debate room.

The TV is on cause the kids are letting a DVD/Netflix cartoon play (I didn't say they are actually watching it) or because we are playing something XBox.

I have Digital OTA but local news is just depressing.
 
I worked for Group W Cable in SoCal for four years in the '80s. Never got cable installed, even though it would have been free.
 
Except for most local sports which is difficult to find (and that's why I got to sports bars with friends) you can find nearly everything you used to get with cable online. Sometimes even at the same time a program is airing. If you have google foo and patience, and no how to spot the scam pages from the legit bootleg feeds, you can find live streams of most everything.

I don't have cable, yet I've watched every episode of the Walking Dead and Son's of Anarchy on my computer at the same time as everyone else. Sites like Justintv and Ufreetv usually has streams to just about every cable channel or special program. Shows like Walking dead you may find 3-4 folks putting up the feed on Justin Tv.

The caveat to this is that sometimes the quality is low, or the feed is glitchy, OR bots/mods may try to quash the feeds, but if you follow certain stream broadcasters they will usually throw a backup feed right away and direct you to it as it is happening. And often these feeds have mangled names to throw off the bots, like "Shambling Unliving" for example.

And if you like cooking shows, or pawn shop shows, or whatever, a lot of folks on JTV, and some of the other sites do marathons of one particular show, putting up all episodes then swtiching after a few days. I've watched every No reservations episode that way, plus cooking shows you can't see here like Gordon's Ramsay's "The F Word" which is much better than the BS shows they have him host over here.

I also bought recently a ROKU set top box for my TV which allows me to watch all sort of programming from the web right on my tv, in HD if the streams are. I can even watch those channels from Justintv as well.

I haven't had cable for years, and haven't really missed it TOO much. I can't always watch Tiger's Baseball because there's noone usually streaming Fox Sports Detroit on a regular basis...but since there are ESPN feeds online, I can watch them when ESPN hosts the games, or when they appear on network tv.....Red Wing hockey can be difficult as well, but there's usually one stream available, either from Fox Detroit or the city where their opponent is from for every game.

There's sites like Crackle that have older episodes of most shows and even movies available.


There's also obviously Netflicks or Amazon or even the new one that Walmart is hosting VuDu I think it is called, that you can watch episodes of new shows for a small cost, usually only 24 hours after it aired on TV.....

Between online, netwrok tv with the over the air antenna, and my roku box, and all the channels on there, I've not missed much....In fact I've discovered even cooler programs from England that didn't air here in the states. I've been watching a bunch of BBC- Channel 4 history shows on Dailymotion where they take a historian, and two anthropolgist and live an entire year in a certain time period, living, working, raising food, cooking, etc. There's one series where the recreated a Victorian Pharamacy for a year in a historical village. One where the lived on a recreated Medieval farm. One where they did the same on a Victorian farm, and Edwardian era farm, and the current one about life on a Farm in England during WWII, where they've re-created everything including taking in refugees, food rationing, survivng bombing runs, and even setting up an underground resistance movement.

And I've even found some great cooking shows from Australia and England that are even better than ones of Food Network.
 
I worked for Group W Cable in SoCal for four years in the '80s. Never got cable installed, even though it would have been free.

I worked for McLean Hunter and Tribune/United in the 80's. That's one of reasons I won't pay for cable now, most every company was bought out by Comcast in Michigan, and their corporate ways of doing things, and customer service are just dirty. I love how they've changed their name to "xfinity" to try to shed their reputation, but you can put lipstick on a pig, and it's still a pig.
 
football is the only reason to buy cable.

ESPN 3.com

the cooking shows are good,I am always hungry

Used to like the Food Network, until the lineup looked like this:

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The caveat to this is that sometimes the quality is low, or the feed is glitchy, OR bots/mods may try to quash the feeds, but if you follow certain stream broadcasters they will usually throw a backup feed right away and direct you to it as it is happening. And often these feeds have mangled names to throw off the bots, like "Shambling Unliving" for example.

Legality issues aside, watching a low quality feed on my laptop is not my idea of a good time. I much prefer watching my shows in HD on my big ass TV with surround sound...
 
I used to enjoy the History Channel, Discovery Channel and the like - it's now entirely crappy whiny motorcycle builders yelling at each other or pawn dealers who are bad actors working an obviously staged situation.

The majority of the quality content has shifted to H2 and the Science Channel. The regular History Channel, Discovery and TLC have turned to reality TV channels and it pisses me off to no end.
 
Legality issues aside, watching a low quality feed on my laptop is not my idea of a good time. I much prefer watching my shows in HD on my big ass TV with surround sound...

I'm happy for you, I really am. :rolleyes:

I don't care enough about tv to spend money on a big ass tv with surround sound, just like I don't care enough to give money to comcast. So that's not an issue for me. AND quite a lot of the stuff, especially on the HD roku, IS in HD. Heck, with the rise in SMART tvs these days, most things are online anyway.

But tv is usually simply background noise for me while I'm doing other things like cooking, reading or surfing the web. And in terms of cooking shows, ideas. But I don't need to see the pimples on someone's face while doing it.

And other people don't seem to feel the need to watch programming on big assed tv's these days either,it seems, going by what I see around me, people are preferring to watch content on their laptops, tablets and even smart phones.
 
hey....a big ass TV is bound become a relic here pretty soon. Internet ready TVs that really are computers is the way things will go, or possibly big ass monitors with surround sound all that crap.
 
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