It had been a long time coming. But it was finally time to say goodbye and move on to somebody new.
No, it’s not a personal relationship of mine, but, like many others, I’m referring to my relationship with cable television.
In a small town, I always felt like I was held captive a bit by cable. It’s not like there were a ton of choices, and I never liked the idea of a dish on my house. We were with what is now Consolidated Communications for a very long time, but after many problems with the DVR and watching my bill jack up routinely, we switched to Midco some years back when they made their services available in Ellendale.
We were very pleased. Our bill was cut dramatically, though I knew that was only for a limited time as a way to snare new customers. As that bill started to climb, we made the decision to cut back to a different level of cable channels; the level we were at only had about two channels that we maybe sometimes watched.
And here is the big problem with cable television: too many channels! And if you really like that one particular channel, you might have to pay extra to have it, along with 40 other channels you’ll never watch. I knew I could do without those channels and just wait for the seasons of shows I watched on those networks to appear on Netflix or Amazon Prime.
This is the struggle cable companies now have. There are more and more people, especially the younger generation, who will just wait for an entire season to be on a streaming service and then binge-watch the entire season in a week. So as fewer people subscribe to cable, the rates go up. And it wasn’t long before my bill with Midco matched what I used to pay with Consolidated.
For so many people, what they can find on streaming services is enough entertainment. A problem there is that streaming services are populating like rabbits. For a while, most people focused on Netflix, Prime, and Hulu. I found that the material on the first two listed was enough for us.
But then Disney+ arrived. And Apple TV+. And HBO Max. And Peacock. And I’m sure I’m missing some. I had to add Disney+ based on their Star Wars and Marvel material. I got a free one-year subscription to Apple TV+. My watch lists are so long that I don’t think I’ll ever catch up. So who needed cable TV anymore?
Here was the conundrum: sports. There is very little we watch in real time anymore. As a family, we watch Survivor when it’s on, but otherwise, it’s rare that we have any Must See TV. I’m guessing for people like us, reality shows are one thing you want to watch right away to avoid spoilers of who gets voted out or wins. I’ve got some of my co-workers who also watch Survivor, so we usually spend part of Thursday talking about what happened. Otherwise, there isn’t much that necessitates the old “water cooler” talk.
But sports, that was the real kicker. When the Twins or Vikings are on, I want to watch them live. And for a long time, that was why we held onto cable.
Then I started hearing about different streaming services that also offered live television, specifically Hulu Live and YouTube TV. I chatted with people who were using each and finally settled on trying out YouTube TV. After our trial period, I was sold. I could get even more sports channels than I could with cable and would save about $50 a month. The DVR part of YouTube TV was unlimited, and it has yet to miss an episode of a show I want to watch. The Roku I had to buy was also nice since it allows me to switch easily from YouTube TV to any of our streaming services, including my DC Universe comic book app.
We started this at the end of December, and I had full intentions of writing this column in March, as I prepared for another season of Twins baseball. And then, well, you know what happened in March.
But now, as MLB prepares to maybe, hopefully, play a shortened season, I’m ready to watch live sports again. (Sorry, the arm wrestling matches I watched one night don’t count.)
And, of course, as I prepared to write this, YouTube TV sent out a notice that they were adding channels and, by the way, raising the price.
Sigh. I can see where this is going.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is prestidigitation, which means magic tricks performed, as in, “It took an act of prestidigitation to switch among the many remotes needed before he got everything he needed in a Roku.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!