And so it has come to this. Your faithful TV Nerd has canceled his cable TV service in favor of going the Hulu Plus/Amazon Instant Video route, courtesy of a Roku box. Our cable bill became unreasonably astronomical at roughly $150 a month, which is much too much to pay for 200+ channels of mostly nothing interesting. Luckily, we were able to keep our cable modem, so our internet and streaming capabilities haven’t been interrupted.
After two decades of being a cable subscriber, it’s going to be a big adjustment not watching shows as they air, but generally I’ve been recording them on the DVR and watching them on other days anyway, so I guess not much will actually change. Except I won’t be dropping big bucks every month for a service I don’t really need anymore. (Hulu Plus is only $7.99 a month!)
It’s a brave new world out there, folks. Especially when it comes to watching TV. There are so many new ways to do it without actually needing cable (or a TV, for that matter) that sometimes I feel a bit like Phil Hartman’s Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer: Your strange new streaming capabilities frighten and confuse me! But it’s also kind of cool. We’ll see how it works out, but I suspect it’s going to be just fine.
If TV companies would only charge you a few dollars per channel you choose rather than to sell you packages, it would be worth having TV service. But the TV companies are so greedy they are losing many customers such as you now.
They must really hate all the new streaming services like Roku, AppleTV, etc. You’d think they would change their own business models to adapt, but no, they’re too stubborn and too greedy.