Is cable a waste of money?

http://www.nypost.com/seven/10162008/entertainment/cut_the_cord_133791.htm

Good argument to drop the cable bill...

-You're not really using most of what you're paying for
-Who watches shows when they're actually on?
-Most of the major networks are streaming online. For free.*
-Xbox and PlayStation offer downloadable shows and movies
-Don't rule out YouTube
-Commercials...yuk.

*complete list of online streeaming TV

http://www.nypost.com/seven/10162008/entertainment/its_showtime_133790.htm

Very interesting! Thanks for posting! Makes me do a double take over how much we are spending for digital cable and what are the alternatives...

Cable is a big waste of money. Dish is eaqually a waste. The internet is not a suitable replacement for true HD. Much of the time, it is not a suitable replacement for SD digital. Bootlegs have poor quality. There is paid advertising. TV shows may not fill the screen. I am obsessed with movies. Premium cable with On Demand is my choice for movies. Cable has more HD movies, including HD not yet available on BluRay. I think I will keep wasting money on cable.

well its either cable or WHAT? verizon fios is the other alterntive i can see but they dont have service in where i live yet anyway

Cable is better than the Dish system.. I've been to family and friends who have Dish/Direct and both work the same way well it's more like a nightmare. Some of you might have ideal conditions you're luckly the rest of the users live with horror stories. My cable bill just goes up, up, up, up, up........

When I had dropped Comcast and return their digital box, I didn't have the power cord they told me I'll be charged $5 bucks for that. In the end I was never charged.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/10162008/entertainment/cut_the_cord_133791.htm

Good argument to drop the cable bill...Hmmm... some silliness here, but I came to expect that from the NY Post when growing up in New York.

-You're not really using most of what you're paying forMy car seats five, but even when the car is moving, typically only one or two seats are occupied; and the car is moving only a very small percentage of the time.

My computer has a 3 GHz processor, but most of the time the computer is idle.

There are many things for which we purchase access to a broad array, but in doing so we're simply purchasing access to the part of that array that we want. All that is needed to justify any specific level of service is you seeing the value in the price charged for what you'd use of what is offered.

Right now, my wife and I are thinking about knocking cable down to limited basic. For us, the value proposition is $50 per month for (specifically) Mad Men (AMC), Sanctuary (Sci-Fi), The Soup (E!), Mythbusters (DSC), CNN, MSNBC, The Weather Channel, our local Public Access Channel, some Travel Channel shows, and recording Stargate Atlantis (Sci-Fi) and Starter Wife (USA) for viewing during late December and early January. Guess what, it actually is worth that much for those services (and nothing else). It's close, I'll admit, but this is the time of year when cable is worth the least. Come late December, even with the shows we're recording now to watch then, we'll be hurting for programming, and will be very happy that we have Discovery Channel, HGTV, Food Network, etc., to choose programming from, then. So yes, October and November, it is tough (but not impossible) to justify the cost of cable, but most of the rest of the year, it is actually very easy for us to do so.

-Who watches shows when they're actually on?Well, most people do, and for broadcast shows there is no reason not to (especially since limited basic cable is less than $10 per month in many areas). Beyond that, DVDs aren't HD, even compared to 3:1 muxed HDTV.

We do love DVDs, though, and quite frankly, I wouldn't mind converting from cable to DVDs, but we don't have a big enough backlog of shows yet*, to make the jump in any significant way.

* We're currently waiting for the following series on DVD: Dexter Season 2, Dexter Season 3, L Word Season 5, Brotherhood Season 2, Tudors Season 2, Meadowlands Season 1, Secret Diary of a Call Girl Season 1, The Shield Season 7. However, most of those aren't even out yet (at least one may never be released!) and even after all of them are out, that's only about 100 hours of viewing. We wouldn't make it through the summer with that backlog, assuming all of those are available by next summer, which is unlikely. However, to be fair, we are building this backlog, and perhaps in 2010 it will grow large enough that we can make the leap to DVDs.

-Most of the major networks are streaming online. For free.*Irrelevant AFAIC. I want to watch television on my big-screen television, not on my laptop, sharing my television viewing with my wife.

And beyond the regular barriers to that that streaming online presents normally, my wife is hearing impaired, and the vast majority of online streaming ignores the needs of the disabled, despite the ADA.

Online streaming over-taxes broadband infrastructure. I don't want to degrade my ability to work at home, or degrade the ability of school children in my neighborhood to do necessary online research for school, because Joe down the street wants to watch Dexter. So to be fair, if online streaming becomes a standard practice, I want broadband service to be strictly metered, so that each of us pay for the bandwidth we use, instead of us subsidizing Joe's overtaxing of the shared available resource. That might make Joe consider a more efficient means of getting his entertainment (like cable!)

-Xbox and PlayStation offer downloadable shows and moviesDitto.

-Don't rule out YouTubeDouble-ditto.

-Commercials...yuk.The typical American doesn't want to pay the actual cost of their entertainment up-front. They'd rather, for some reason, pay for a good portion of the cost through higher prices for consumer products. Stupid, I know, but tha'ts life.

I faced EXACTLY that issue and contemplated and STILL contemplate removing cable from my life.
BASIC cable (the bare wire) in my area is Comcast at $40.52 including tax and there is pretty much no digital feed on anything other than the HD local channels required by law (and available OTA). With a nice digital HD set, watching mushy analog channels was infuriating. I watch an IMMENSE amount of TV.

I tried the antenna on the wondowsill idea and was blown away by the picture, crystalline High Def on ABC, NBC, CBS, CW-11, UPN, 6 PBS feeds, ION, and a handful of Spanish choices.

BUT I like SCI-FI and my partner is an old movie buff, hence TCM.

Yes, cable is necessary to me for only those two channels and maybe a little house flippping on TLC but they are REALLY necessary. So I opted for a HD STB from Comcast for ANOTHER $10 a month, at least for the time being...OTA for free is still very much on the middle burner. Like an alcoholic, I'll take it month by month.
An aside: I have a friend who watches only the nightly news on an 18 year old 20 inch tube set (in an area with breathtaking digital OTA)...but she pays $68 a month to Time Warner for her cable...now that's just NUTS! She sends Time Warner a check each month purely out of habit.

The argument of not watching all the channels provided is specious...after all, does one avoid the supermarket because one needs only to buy a few items?

As for the on-line feeds, almost everything listed on the link provided is free in High Def over the air The very few streamed shows from F/X, MTV and USA are not an enticing reason to sit at the computer screen. Of all of them, without cable I would watch only BURN NOTICE (and that show is beginning to wear around its formulaic well-worn edges.)

Cable is what it is and everyone must make a personal choice of whether he is getting enough bang for his buck. I'm on the cusp and could go either way in the next few months...I'd LIKE to keep my $50 a month...and any choice is not irrevocable so I could wind up going BOTH ways. :D

(NETFLIX helps A LOT whether WITH or WITHOUT cable and the ROKU box is looking tempting except for my rather slow DSL feed.))

A lot of things are impractical.

Look at the automobile. Cost of vehicle, $30,000? The average person commutes an hour to work, and then it sits in the parking lot for an average of 8 hrs (obviously there are those whose job involves travel, so this is not counted here). Then you commute a hour home, maybe run some errands, maybe another hour, then it sits in your driveway. So maybe you use the car for 3hrs a day...maybe.

Let's break down the yearly cost:
Vehicle - $6,000/yr if you own the car for 5 years,(not includng financing since I know everyone buys it cash :lol: )
Insurance - maybe $2,000/yr
Maintenance - maybe $500/yr?
Registration & Inspection (NY) - $87/year
Fuel - pay as you go
Total - roughly $8,600/yr. for something that you use 3 hrs a day.

If the average viewer watches 3 hrs a day of TV at a cost of $840/yr (premier package), that's about 1/10 the cost of a car.

Maybe we should all ride bicycles.

Cable is better than the Dish system.. I've been to family and friends who have Dish/Direct and both work the same way well it's more like a nightmare. Some of you might have ideal conditions you're luckly the rest of the users live with horror stories. My cable bill just goes up, up, up, up, up........

When I had dropped Comcast and return their digital box, I didn't have the power cord they told me I'll be charged $5 bucks for that. In the end I was never charged.

You're not responding to the essence of this thread. It's not about which is better. It's about paying for what you use....ala carte. Dish, satellite, cable...all same. 100 + channels but do you watch them all. I watch only the HD channels plus maybe a few standard but I still pay for the full package. I know it sucks but till an ala carte package comes around we are stuck with this "waste of money" thingy.

cheezz

cheezz

Ala Carte could wind up costing you more. The programming will still cost the cable/sattelite companies the same amount of $$.

Right now everyone pays for the channels that you like to watch, whether they want to watch it or not, same as you paying for channels that you don't want to watch.

So if it becomes ala carte and only 25% of the subscribers want to watch the channels that you want, then the entire cost gets spread out amounts the 25%, and your cost can go up.

Ala Carte could wind up costing you more.Not necessarily. Folks who are willing to live with three or four cable channels, total, can save a bit of money with a la carte, while folks who want 20-30 cable channels will pay a lot more.

The programming will still cost the cable/sattelite companies the same amount of $$. Yes, the system will likely be pretty-much revenue neutral, with channels that fewer viewers care about (including channels that only minorities care about) probably converting to home shopping. :)

If I could buy just 2 channels from Comcast for perhaps $10 each/month that's what I would buy. With digital OTA broadcasting and Netflix rentals, my TV watching needs would be completely fulfilled, and $30 cheaper than what I am paying now.

If they charge MORE than $10 per channel, then they will very quickly go out of business and thus I would asssume the alacarte for break-even would be FAR less...I just stated my probable maximum.
Perhaps at $10 per month I'd even let the Sci-Fi channel go.

I don't think it would be $10 per channel (except perhaps ESPN). I think channels like USA and FX would be less than $5 per month per channel -- probably closer to $4 per month per channel. Actually, I suspect that the way the pricing would be set up would be with a $5-$6 per month "a la carte package fee" which gets you no channels, but instead just enables the service where by you can get individual channels at a rate of $3 per month per channel.

Cable is better than the Dish system.. I've been to family and friends who have Dish/Direct and both work the same way well it's more like a nightmare. Some of you might have ideal conditions you're luckly the rest of the users live with horror stories.

My DIRECTV system works fine. All my friends and family with DIRECTV are happy.

Why is your family and friends Dish/Direct systems a nightmare ?

Tell us about these horror stories you mentioned.

As has been stated here, it is stupid to say that you are wasting money because you do not use all the channels on cable. I like to watch movies, and drama TV shows. You might like sports. I will say for example that I watch 60 movies a month. Also for example I will say I spend $150 a month for cable. These are estimates. The average would be $2.50 a movie. I think thats a fair price to pay. I know there is a lot of competition for my entertainment dollar. I like cable. A la carte would hurt smaller stations. Do you like any channels that are not the most popular? They could easily go out of business.

"Who watches shows when they are on?" That sounds like an argument in favor of cable to me. I have a DVR, and watch what I want, when I want, without commercials.

The primary argument of the original NY Post article was that internet is better than cable. The replies here on this web site have not talked much about internet. My computer is hooked to my TV, and is capable of true HD from the internet. I do not watch internet on my computer monitor. I do not watch short YouTube videos inside a tiny box. Even so, the internet is not that good yet. The NY Post is wrong, or at least jumping the gun.

The primary argument of the original NY Post article was that internet is better than cable. The replies here on this web site have not talked much about internet.I thought I had. Internet video sources don't comply with ADA. So they aren't better than cable; any advantages they do have come at the price of principles of equality and equal protection that our society has elevated to the level of national imperatives, which Internet sources have chosen to ignore.

I felt exactly like this article-- except about my PHONE BILL. I bought a MajicJack, and now my phone service is less tha $20 a YEAR-- with NO extra charges for long distance- and it works great. (You do need a computer running all the time though.)
Now, if I dump my cable service, I will not have broadband, phone or TV . . .

www.majicjack.com