The IP Broadband revolution continues

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Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca on the Sci-Fi Chan­nel is pret­ty much my only rea­son for hav­ing cable ser­vice. Sure, I occa­sion­al­ly watch OnDe­mand movies, but I real­ly hate watch­ing any­thing good in low-res pan-and-scan. Con­sid­er­ing that I’m dump­ing over $120 each month on some real­ly unsat­is­fac­to­ry ser­vices, I’m con­sid­er­ing downgrading.

Apple’s iTunes has made Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca episodes avail­able less than 24 hours after the ini­tial broad­casts. Each episode costs about two bucks and can be watched over and over again with­out com­mer­cial inter­rup­tion. The res­o­lu­tion is not quite ide­al, but it looks pret­ty good on screen from across the room. Even in a month with five new episodes, that’s ten bucks.

I’m not quite cer­tain I’m going to aban­don broad­cast TV entire­ly, but I’m at least going to check and see how much I can strip down the cable ser­vice and com­pare those prices with going back to DSL. Going back to DSL would mean pay­ing for plain-old-tele­phone ser­vice again, so that prob­a­bly would not be the most cost-effec­tive option. Still, it’s time I looked into not pay­ing exor­bi­tant amounts of mon­ey for enter­tain­ment that I don’t watch and don’t enjoy. Even just get­ting rid of a pre­mi­um chan­nel would pay for two movie tick­ets or sev­en DVD rentals each month. If they’ll let me down­grade to basic and still keep broad­band, that’s six movie tick­ets or twen­ty-one DVD rentals in a month.

It’s not even like the mon­ey is a huge deal for me, except that in our soci­ety we vote with our dol­lars. I think I’d rather sup­port the mod­els that let me choose what I want and pay only for those things than the bulk 500 chan­nels of crap. In so many ways in this coun­try we’ve cho­sen to fol­low economies of scale, that our stan­dard of liv­ing has increased only through indus­tri­al­iza­tion and the devel­op­ment of tech­nolo­gies. In terms of our abil­i­ty to buy oth­er peo­ple’s time and effort, even the very well off are at a dis­ad­van­tage com­pared to our par­ents, grand­par­ents, and ances­tors dat­ing back to the Black Plague.

Pay­ing only for what I want then becomes a polit­i­cal state­ment. Spooky, isn’t it?

Published by splicer

5 Replies to “The IP Broadband revolution continues”

  1. Def­i­nite­ly call them and
    Def­i­nite­ly call them and com­plain about the price. They’ll won­der why you’re pay­ing XXX dol­lars more than you should if you were on a pro­mo­tion that no one told any­one about. 

    We did that and dropped our bill by $15.00. Now if I can get them to stop rent­ing the remote controls… 🙂

  2. I have cable broad­band on
    I have cable broad­band on basic ser­vice… as far as I know the only two non­ba­sic chan­nels I miss are Sci-Fi and Com­e­dy Cen­tral, and if I can view shows that mat­ter on ITunes, the incen­tive to get those just dropped fur­ther. I am still waf­fling back and forth on whether to add some chan­nels, but the incre­men­tal cost for the chan­nels gained is rather awful. Dish Net­work is a bet­ter TV deal than Com­cast, but then I’d have to get DSL, and I’ve heard a few too many SBC hor­ror sto­ries, plus from what you’re say­ing it sounds like they pun­ish you for not hav­ing a voice line, much as Com­cast pun­ish­es you for get­ting cable broad­band with­out TV service.

    For me what sucks about basic cable is the lack of high def. If I want to watch a foot­ball game or some­thing in high def, I have to fid­dle with an antenna.

    I total­ly see DVD rentals (or scroung­ing the used DVDs at Rasputin) as more attrac­tive than pre­mi­um channels.

    In five years or so we’ll have inter­net TV and nobody will be able to dic­tate a chan­nel selec­tion to any­one. They’re work­ing right now on an inter­net radio ser­vice that you can lis­ten to through the cel­lu­lar network…

  3. Hmmm. I’m hop­ing that I can
    Hmmm. I’m hop­ing that I can keep high-def. I don’t care to have their tuner box, but I do want the stan­dard broad­cast chan­nels avail­able in HD. So I may have to run with “Stan­dard” cable instead of “Basic.” That’s a dif­fer­ence of thir­ty bucks a month though. Outrageous!

    I wish I felt con­fi­dent in get­ting a cus­tomer ser­vice rep on the line who will under­stand the dis­tinc­tion between get­ting the HDTV sig­nal over the cable and hav­ing the HDTV box. As it is, they prob­a­bly just have a list that says “HDTV” and it’s a line item.

    Not using their cable box means not being able to view their encrypt­ed chan­nels, and what they choose to encrypt seems pret­ty arbi­trary, but once again, I don’t want to pay for their whim­si­cal choices.

  4. I have heard from many
    I have heard from many sources, but have been unable to ver­i­fy, that if you have an HD tuner in your TV, you will get the HD ver­sions of the local broad­cast sta­tions along with basic cable, even though offi­cial­ly they aren’t includ­ed. My TV is sup­posed to have a cable HD tuner, but appar­ent­ly the firmware for it was­n’t fin­ished when the TV sets shipped, and I was told by some oth­er own­ers that I need to reflash the TV’s ROM in order to get this fea­ture. As yet I have been unable to track down any­one who can do this, though I heard last year about some­one hav­ing a kit with which you could do it your­self (a CD and a spe­cial ser­i­al cable).

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