6 months ago, I got fed up with trying and trying and trying to get Direct TV to fix our bad service, watching the same reruns and movies night after night, and paying well over 100 dollars a month for it. My daughters and I decided to "cut the cable" and see if we could get the same entertainment for less by joining the growing group of Americans who are switching over to the services provided by the internet..
Mistake number one was to do this during Super Bowl weekend - up to that time I was finding all the football I wanted to watch on the internet, but on that Sunday, I couldn't find a single link that didn't require a rather substantial payment just to watch. We got through that night ok, though, and moved on with our experiment. I found MLBtv, for a month, and watched a little baseball, watched a TON of movies that I'd never heard of, and found many internet services that provided television shows, while not viewed on the same evenings, but allowed me to keep up with my old programs, to a point.
Mistake number two, I missed seeing the Sooners play last weekend - again, I thought I could find the game online, but despite looking I was unable to find it without paying a substantial fee. Since I love watching college football, particularly the Sooners, I started thinking I wasn't too pleased with my decision to cut the cord.
This week, I was stricken by that nasty stomach thing that has been going around town. I ended up staying home on Wednesday. However, what I hadn't counted on was my forgetting to pay the phone bill (I pay all my bills online, and forgetting this one bill has been a thorn in my side for almost a year - another story for another time) and my phone/internet service being cut off that very same day. When I'm laying on the couch miserable, the last thing I want to do is read - I'd much rather just lay there and mindlessly watch the tube, which led up to the main reason I didn't totally go for the whole internet television experience. After every movie, every television show, every documentary, you're required to manually move to another or the next episode, show, movie or whatever. And, no commercials mean shows are much shorter than normal. It doesn't sound like much, but if you watch 6 movies in a day, or 20 tv shows, that means you are manually moving from one to the next every single time. It gets old.
So, as I lay there after having paid my bill with my cell (LOVE this option) and waiting for them to find some time to flip a switch and reconnect my internet service, my daughter walks in with the mail in which I receive a letter about a deal from Suddenlink. I had cut cable service YEARS ago when Heartland Wireless was here, and had said I would never go back to just cable service, but after the garbage service Direct TV was giving me, the option was either Suddenlink or another satellite service. And at HALF the cost of what DirectTV was costing me.
So, reluctantly, yet with some excitement, I called and set up an appointment to get cable service again. This whole time I was thinking, why don't they just plug the cable in like the old days and be done with it? Well, the service guy showed up BEFORE the scheduled appointment time - seriously, when have you ever heard of a cable guy showing up EARLY? Plus one for Suddenlink! Yay!
I had totally forgotten about the whole digital television requirement thing the government had imposed on the nation and realized while the cable guy was setting up cable boxes that you just don't plug into the wall anymore. It's actually more complicated than that, so I realized why I needed a service man there now. PLUS, he found out why my service with Direct TV had been bad - something about a connecter that was totally rusted through outside. He told me that it was a common problem, and that it was bad enough he had to bypass it to get it to work. Yet, DirectTV had spent a year or more insisting it was my television that was causing all the problems after many, many calls to get them to fix it. So another plus one for Suddenlink finding the issue and fixing it for me when I couldn't get a satellite company to go further than talking to me on the phone.
Now, here's the funny part. I cut the cord in the first place, as I said, because of the amount of money I was paying for reruns and having hundreds of channels with nothing on. Tonight, before I fell asleep on the couch, I was flipping through stations and noticing that, yup, reruns and movies I had already seen and nothing on. BUT...now I get to watch live news AND commercials AND can set it on one channel without having to constantly find something else to watch. And I'm loving not having streaming problems! So, I guess it's 6 of one, half a dozen of the other.
