A last minute job came up last week that takes me to San Diego CA Friday through Monday. I’ll be there to shoot some sessions of a seminar and then bring the footage back to edited down and repurposed for the clients website.
I’ll be working all day Saturday and Sunday, and flying home Monday morning.
While I’ve wanted to do this for a long time now, it was a slow process. Little by little over the last 2 years or so, we’ve been changing our TV viewing habits. In large part because life with 3 young kids leaves very little time to watch TV. But also because TV content is being made available in more ways all the time.
I remember what it was like to get cable for the first time in the 80’s and how exciting it was. Going from 5-10 basic channels to over 50, with channels like MTV was pretty exciting. It was hard to imagine going back to life before cable.
But over the years things have changed in the broadcast industry. No longer is broadcast/cable/satellite the only way to get content. In fact, having to be home at a certain time to watch your favorite program on TV seems archaic now. We’ve had a Tivo almost since it came out in 1999, and that was a huge change in the way we watched TV. But now we have so many other ways to receive content (and a lot less time to view it) that watching any kind of TV at all is pretty rare. We either have the TV on for the kids to watch something, or for an hour or two a week for ourselves. So why pay $40-$100 a month for tons of channels that we never get to watch.
In some ways the most difficult thing about cutting the cable was just breaking the habit. When I first mentioned it to Brenda a few years ago her eyes went wide and she wanted to know what channels we would be losing. I was a bit apprehensive as well after so many years of having it. Could we really do it?
So we took it slow. First we dropped all of the premium channels, HD channels and went to their most basic package. That is, the one that they don’t even tell you about unless you ask. They’re required by law to offer it, but not to tell you about it. That got us down to $40 per month, but the quality of the picture looked like hell. We have a 52” LCD TV, and everything we were getting was 4×3 VHS quality. Even channels that are broadcasting HD are downgraded and sent as NTSC. It was a pretty big downgrade.
After a year of that I decided to look into getting a HD antenna. Not one of those rabbit ears, but an old school – on the roof – antenna. I had it on my project list for awhile to get this done myself, but after several months made peace with the fact that I just didn’t have the time and probably never would.
So like most project I can’t do, I turned it over to ServiceMagic.com to find an expert in my area that could just get it done.
One test of your nerdhood is how much of the internet you use a month. I’ve never checked, and it’s about 5 to 6 times higher than I would have guessed. And, I’m proud of it! That is, until they start to charge extra for going over the 250gig per month cap, which I’m doing almost 3x over.
They send you a gold card.
