CABLE TV
Several weeks ago, after a particularly heavy rain, I was out in the side yard pulling weeds. I have no idea what kind of plants they were. They were new to me. I had never seen them before this year. They had carrot like tops and long carrot-like roots. They are very hard to pull unless the ground is very soft and wet. They come out fairly easily in soft wet dirt and I was making progress on the new crop of carrot weeds.
As I was popping these nasty plants out of my yard, a man approached. He was walking his dog on the sidewalk. I have always thought it would be appropriate to accuse such folk as taking their dogs out for a shit. That is actually what they are doing. Which is okay as long as they pickup after their animals. I consider those who don’t to be a kind of animal themselves and would not hesitate to accuse them of taking their pets out for a shit at the expense of local property owners. However, this gentleman had a plastic bag with him. The bag looked as though he had already recovered at least one turd.
Anyway, he had noticed my chimney mounted Dish Network antenna and was curious as to how well I was satisfied with Dish Network. He further disclosed that he was using cable both for cable TV and internet access and was not all that pleased with the service. His main problem was with e-mail services with the ISP.
I was using the same ISP, a cable service, but I was not using them to provide cable TV. I did not have the problems he had with e-mail because I was using web based mail managed by the service that was providing me with web space and web service. If you are serious about doing anything constructive with a website or blog, you need to have better and less restrictive support than what an ordinary ISP will provide. Sometimes I wonder why ISPs even bother. Serious users are not going to be interested in restricted e-mail and web space provided by folks who seem incapable of providing necessary support. Especially in the area of ISPs providing cable service. We have gone from @Home to AT&T to Comcast to RoadRunner since we first obtained cable internet service. Each time one goes belly up, we get new e-mail addresses. We finally decided that it made more sense not to use such a fickle service for e-mail. All we need from them is a reliable internet connection. They can keep their restricted, unreliable, and inadequate e-mail and web site nuisances.
After that discussion I began to think about cable TV as it compared to Dish Network and Direct TV. I have used both satellite systems and my son had used cable TV. Overall the programming content from all three is the same. The channels may change in the numbers they are assigned but the content is the same.
Currently we have one cut above basic service with no premium channels.
Premium channels cost about ten bucks a month, every month, even though they show the same movies for up to six months at a time. It is sort of like renting the same movie from block buster every day for six months and paying 60 bucks for the priviledge of being a fool. Netflix at 5 bucks a month is a much better deal. Even block buster would be better but we don’t do business with block buster anymore. They busted their credibility with unfair late charges making them an undesirable vendor.
I am not entirely sure how many channels we actually get. I am sure there are more than a hundred available, but I also know that only about ten are worth watching. Even those are prone to showing the same material over and over again, but it takes about a year before you begin to notice repeats and they don’t become an annoyance unless you have been a customer for two or more years.
I remember that my wife wanted ‘cable’ because there was nothing worth watching on the six or so local off-air channels we were receiving at the time. Now we have hundreds of channels and there is still not all that much worth watching and it is costing us considerably more.
When I pay for something I expect to get some value for what I am charged and I do, to some extent. What bothers me is the pay-per-view crap these folk try to pull. If I am paying for cable, I have already paid to view and I consider any further requests for money to be legalized extortion committed by some of the greediest folk in the world.
Some cable channels will show movies without commercial interruption. Most of them do not. I feel that any cable channel running commercials should be free of charge.
Some cable channels, known as shopping networks, are merely scamers preying on the public. There are more than a few of these channels. I think the cable provider needs to pay his customers to be able to send them these useless channels that specialize in selling junk to the unsuspecting.
Some cable channels are blacked out. I have never understood why that is. I have no desire to know that some channels are blocked out. Make them disappear and remove them from the list of channels offered in a package. A channel that has no content has no value.
Some channels are previews of premium channels. There are also two channels which are wasted announcing the existence of these preview channels. Previews occur very infrequently and do not respond with useful information when the info button is pressed.
Some channels are in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish. My friends don’t speak Spanish. I think that offering channels in other languages is a neat idea. I think that forcing them on everyone sucks. Folks interested in receiving those Spanish channels should be charged extra and ordinary people should not have to be subjected to such nonsense.
Overall, we still use Dish Network and probably will continue to do so. Unless, of course they increase their prices. Any increase at all at this point will be cause to discontinue the service because it is barely useful as it stands. Additional funds would be better spent with Netflix and other movie rental services.