By J.B. Lester
The price of cable television is ridiculous. We were paying around $300+ a month for so many channels, most of which we never watched. Most of the package we chose was one that included some of our favorite shows plus our local sports teams. There was no cheap package that included all of those. I guess they feel if they fill our package with so many channels we would feel like we were getting a good deal. But $300+ a month is a small car payment.
Truth is, they hope you get addicted to all those choices, but truth be told, more is not always better. Too many hours scrolling channels. So, after much conversation and the decision of the sports teams to get their own channels, we dumped cable. Yes, what a savings. We switched to streaming alone. We had already been paying for some streaming channels like Netflix, Prime and Disney. We were probably paying closer to $400 a month for our television watching. That’s a bigger car payment.
Since I retired, we had to cut back. And I am glad we did. What a savings. No more sea of channels that were never watched. Money wasted and now saved. That’s the good news. But suddenly we found ourselves in the world of streaming. There was no set time to watch Perry Mason, then Matlock, then the Waltons. I had that all planned out with my cable schedule. I had to learn a whole new way of viewing. And quite frankly, it’s been a year now and I am still learning.
There are so many streaming apps to download to watch so many channels. Sound familiar? But at least you can choose them ala carte. They are not forced on you. And yet that is both good and bad. You have to learn to choose the right streaming services for your needs. It takes time to figure out. Netflix, Hulu, Prime, Frndly, Britbox, Peacock, Paramount+, YouTube, PBS, HBO max, Disney, Hulu, Apple TV, CNN … you get the picture.
I think young people are better at this than us old folk since they might have just started with streaming and never got hooked on cable. But all the choices are overwhelming and not that cheap when you add it all up. Many are $30, $20 or $10 a month or you can pay by the year and save a little. But if you get 10 to 15 streaming services to cover the bases on the things you were watching on cable, it adds up fast. Maybe not to $400 a month, but be careful and do the math. I suppose the best thing is “you get to choose” and all the extra channels aren’t forced upon you. It is also harder for me to plan my day with streaming. And you can’t always record and play back the same as you did before.
Switching over to streaming from cable is like learning a new language. It takes time and commitment to be able to communicate with your tv. Streaming also comes with glitches. I was watching the local news and the newscaster was cut off in mid-sentence by a commercial. And often when we want to go back to where we were in a show and hit resume, it takes us to the wrong episode. The navigation can be challenging for sure. But we are saving money and we get the “choice” no matter how frustrating it might be. We just have to learn the language in this new country. We have to learn that less is more. We have to take a breath and wade through this stream until we reach the banks of tv Nirvana. And for old dogs, new tricks are hard to learn – but not impossible. Oh, Murder She Wrote is on, gotta go upstream somewhere!