“No, we don’t want TV service, just internet, thank you.”
When we moved this past week, we decided to not get cable TV in our new home for a couple of reasons:
- Save money - ~$40 a month (we only had standard cable, no fancy digital stuff) - Get Rich Slowly has a good article about this, as well as alternatives to cable
- Information overload - I have talked about this before. These days, we have so much information available to us at our fingertips (some of it of a higher quality than others) that it can become overwhelming and turns into noise. Don’t absorb information (entertainment, news, etc) just because it is available (particularly for ‘leisure’), use that information if it is something you actually want or truly enjoy - not because it passes time. If you are able to trim the fat from the media, you will spend less time watching junk and more of your TV viewing time will be more enjoyable.
- Most of what we watch is on broadcast - Rather than the recurring cable expense, a one time expenditure on an HDTV antenna will get us 90% of the content we want at a high level of quality, indefinitely. If there is something that we really want to see on cable, we can download it.
Now I have my Media Center computer set up to record shows, and at the moment, it is recording more shows than we have time to watch right now, creating a library of good content available for us to view when we want, rather than a large pool of junk (also known as ‘whatever is on TV right now’). Also, I have yet to check, but if Time Warner dropped the ball when they hooked up the cable, we may still be able to get some free cable TV.
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