Adventures in Cord Cutting Part 7 - Money Out the Window

Money out the window. For the purposes of this blog and this subject, that's actually a good thing. Well, maybe not "good", but very telling.

See, the other day, Beth and I were upstairs watching something. I think it might have been Brooklyn 99 (Which is hilarious, btw) or the Grammys (Where our daughter's commercial was running!) or one of the Amazon Pilots (Transparent is terrific. Watch it) and I turned to her and asked, "So, when was the last time you watched anything on DirecTV downstairs?"
She took a moment and thought about it and responded, "I watched an episode of 'How I Met Your Mother', I think."
"That's network. That's CBS. What about cable?"
This pause was much longer.
"Nothing, really."

And that, my friends, was the beginnings of the next phase of the "adventures in Cord Cutting".

"Wait!", she said, "I really want to see 'The Returned'. Is that on DirecTV?"

I looked it up on canistreamit.com and saw that it was not.

"But,", I said, "once we get through some of the stuff we have backlogged, we should just buy it. That's what we said we were gonna do, anyway."

And that was a great strategy. Until....

Netflix announced that it will be airing "The Returned" starting at the end of February.

Sure. There are a couple things lingering on the Satellite. Some new "Cougar Towns" from TBS. A couple of "American Horror Stories" from...wherever that is from. But, really. What's the point?

House of Cards is coming back.

The Returned is coming.

CBS just licensed a bunch of shows to Hulu.

And, we only have a couple hours at night, at best, to watch anything!

Then there's the Olympics. I really wish I liked them more than I do because TiVo is making it super simple to record events. They've broken them down to specific events and you just pick what you want and Tivo records it. Off NBC.

So, what's the next phase?

When True Blood comes back (Beth is a big fan) we will call DirecTV, threaten to leave and get some deal that will include HBO. We'll watch those shows and then, I think, be done with Satellite.

In the interim, I think I will have to get a Tivo Mini and figure out how to turn the downstairs TV into another Tivo. Shouldn't be too hard. Gotta run an ethernet cable or something.

We are very very close to being able to say goodbye to DirecTV. Because that is the cause of the money flying out the window.

I'm sure that, as soon as we do, AT&T will slow down and jack up the price of our Internet. ;)

Adventures in Cord Cutting - Glitch Update

You will recall in article 6 (The Glitch) that there were problems with the new TiVo. Freezing images, etc. The belief of the Tivo tech support was that it was a faulty hard drive and they could replace the box since it was still under warranty.
They sent another box and charged our credit card for the price of the new box. Then included packing instructions and we sent them back the faulty one and they credited the card. No harm, no foul. We have had that box for a few weeks now and it all works great. We are still on the month to month with that box but I am getting the feeling that we are switching to the lifetime pass very very soon.
More to come.