We ditched cable. Yup. My husband has been asking me forever if he can cancel cable. I have not been receptive to the idea because there are a few shows I like to watch on Network TV. He got a ROKU and he signed up for Netflix. This was a long time ago. We watch a lot of our favorite shows on Netflix. Not new stuff. We tend to watch things over again. I am in the middle of watching Fraiser for the third time. We also watch the Star Treks over again. We have a few other series that we watch on Netflix, but sometimes we have to wait for Netflix to get the seasons. You may be familiar with the phenomenon of binge watching a show and then having to wait for the next season to be acquired by Netflix. Recently my husband signed up for Hulu. This was because some of his shows could be watched on Hulu. Hulu gets shows sooner than Netflix. It works out because we can watch them when we want to watch them. We don’t have a DVR, so Hulu and Netflix work good. That left just us needing cable even less. But doesn’t it figure that the only channel that is not on Netflix or Hulu is the channel and the shows that I want to watch. Well, he must have been doing a lot of research in order to get rid of cable. He found CBS has their own streaming channel. Ahhh . . . . my shows. Anytime I want. So we got rid of cable.
We didn’t have any fancy cable package because we don’t really watch that much “new” TV. As I said, we tend to watch shows over and over and over again. I think I mentioned that before in a post. We have a lot of DVDs and Netflix works good for us. Not only did we not have a lot of cable channels we didn’t have the channels in HD. That is one of the reasons why my husband likes to watch the shows he watches on Hulu instead of when they are broadcast on TV because it is in HD. Once he got Hulu for his shows the number of shows we watched on broadcast TV was down to three. So he wanted to cancel cable, but as I said, CBS didn’t put their shows on Hulu or Netflix.
While he and I were in discussions about cancelling cable, a few of the CBS shows showed up on Netflix. But not Hulu. The shows on Netflix were past seasons. Hmmmmm . . . interesting. And then, as I said, he discovered CBS Access or whatever it is. And his major sell was he held up the remote that controls the TV channels and he said, “When was the last time you used this?” I looked at him and couldn’t say. I laughed. I really thought it was funny that I only watched three shows on one channel. So yay! Now we don’t have any TV channels and we can watch TV when we want. I know we are kind of late to the party because we have a lot of friends that are the same way. We will see how it goes.
We had our first giggle this past weekend while we were trying to decide if we were going to watch a re-run of Saturday Night Live. We were discussing that it really wasn’t that good, when my husband said, “Oh, we can’t watch it even if we wanted to.” Again, I laughed because we don’t have the TV channels any longer. Ha!
I am already really enjoying the CBS channel on Thursday nights because I have to teach and usually I rush home to get dinner on the table by 8:00 so I can see Big Bang Theory. I find that when I watch reruns I think I haven’t see the episode, but 10 minutes in I realize I have. But what happens is I am busy with putting dinner on the table so I miss the first few minute. Now . . . I can watch it when I want. I think with both Hulu and CBS there is a time limit. But so far I haven’t been affected by it on Hulu and we just got the CBS channel thing so I will have to see about that.
Another great thing is we have one less remote. At one point when cable did something (I don’t even know what) they gave us a remote that we had to use INSTEAD of our TV remote. We had five (eyes rolling). Now we only have four.
Do you have cable? How many channels do you have? What are your favorite shows? Do you have Netflix? Do you have Hulu?
Terre Pruitt's Blog 