Cable Company

As everyone in America that has (or had) Time Warner Cable knows, they have been bought out by Spectrum.  Two years ago we made the switch from AT&T U-Verse to Spectrum when AT&T wouldn’t negotiate on the price of our service, at least until we had already committed to TWC, and by then it was too late.  Well, the time period of our initial promotion with TWC had come an end at the end of April, and the new bill from Spectrum jacked the price $25ish a month.  So I went in to see what we could do to bring the bill back down, what sort of promotion was currently running, etc…

Fully expecting to have something in hand, I was shocked to find out I needed to select a new TV package, because the service I had been getting with TWC does not equate to any Spectrum packages.  I thought, OK, no problem.  Then I find out that the channels that we watch most are split between three different programming tiers, and that if we wanted them all, well then we’d be paying basically what we are now.  But we could drop down a level or two, and then we’d just be losing channels.  Personally, if we dropped from the top, we’d lose a couple of channels that I watch, and I guess I can live with that, though I sort of liked them because they were showing the programs that used to be on H2 before it was replaced with that crap-pile called Viceland (AHC and Destination America in case you were wondering).  We’d also lose a couple of channels that Alison watches from time to time, like Nickelodeon, though I can’t for the life of me imagine why Nickelodeon isn’t in the basic tier of programming.  And MTV would be gone too, though they don’t play music videos anymore, and when they do, it’s all R&B and rap…  Sorry, no.  But we’d get other MTV channels.  So how they get rid of the flagship, but keep lesser ones is beyond me.  At least with ESPN, you still have the basic ESPN but would lose some of the ESPN satellite networks (ESPN Classic, for example).

 

But even with the change in programming to something with enough channels to still make most everyone in the house happy (i.e. not me) the cost is a couple bucks more than what we were paying.  I’ll probably go with the mid range programming package for now that keeps us at what we were paying, but I am also going to start exploring the streaming options, like the Amazon Fire Stick, or Chromecast, and see what sort of streaming services I can get with those.  Because paying as much as I am for the crappy programming we get with cable is getting out of hand.  I have heard that Sling might be a good option and isn’t too bad as far as a price goes.

 

I’ll have to make a list of the channels we HAVE to have and see what we can do.  I’d be willing to bet there are only about 25 or 30 channels that make up 95% of our TV watching.  Everything else is just waste as far as I am concerned.