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Post by marvelmaniac on Apr 14, 2015 17:25:47 GMT -5
In my area Comcast IMO has a "Monopoly".
FIOS is not available so the only other option for TV is Satellite and Comcast is the only way to get High Speed Internet.
After years(29 years with the same cable company) of doing the rate dance with Comcast I had enough and cut the cord.
My cable bill(TV/Internet/Phone) was going to go up from $119.99 a month to $149.99 a month in May so again I made the call to the retention dept to see what they could do to help me...
(After all they keep telling me I am a "valued" and "loyal customer")
Tired of begging for a lower rate every year I told them I wanted to cancel my TV and Home Phone, they asked why and I told them I was not paying $150 a month for TV when 95% of what I watch is on Broadcast TV and I do not use the home phone.
If you can keep the rate exactly where it is for 1 year we are good.
They came back with a "best" offer of $139.99 and I said NO!!!
Just give me internet for $76.95 a month.
($66.95 as soon as I get my own modem)
Then they said why not add "Basic Limited" for another $11.95 a month and I said why should I pay that when I can get those channels for free?
Then I closed by saying if I want to come back all I have to do is wait a couple of month's and I can upgrade and get "new customer" promotional rates again.
Went out and returned the cable box to the local service center, drove across the parking lot to Walmart and picked up an Indoor Digital Antenna and Google Chromecast.
Now I am getting ALL broadcast channels crystal clear in HD and can watch ANYTHING from YouTube on my TV and still use my computer at the same time.
Now I just need to wait for another internet provider to arrive in the area and I can tell Comcast to...
Anybody else have cable company horror stories?
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Post by adamwarlock2099 on Apr 14, 2015 19:14:06 GMT -5
I haven't had cable or satellite for probably 7-8 years. For my money it was never worth it. I worked too much, only had my oldest son then at 3-4 years old and my wife didn't use it much either. And that was all before or right at the start of netflix and the like. But then I've never watched a lot of "TV". I was always satisfied with the occasional VHS or DVD rental or purchase of a movie. Now I'm 99% netflix with occasional redbox rental.
Internet and one cell phone bill (my son and wife on one plan) are high enough for me to keep up with. That there's probably $120 a month between the two. It's ridiculous. And I do believe that's the lowest rate plan my wife has. It's crazy.
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Post by Randle-El on Apr 14, 2015 21:54:22 GMT -5
My wife and I have been married 7 years and we've never had cable during that time. Our TV viewing has been a combination of over-the-air antenna, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. Even with just Netflix alone, there's more than enough TV to keep us occupied for guilt-inducing amounts of time, but we also use Hulu to keep up with currently airing shows. We were already Prime subscribers for the free shipping, so the video (which we admittedly don't use much) was an added bonus.
The big missing piece with cutting the cord is sports programming. Football season is ok as most NFL games are broadcast on network TV. Baseball season leaves a little to be desired, since there's a ton of games on cable. But there's enough on broadcast to keep me in the loop. I've also taken to listening to more games on the radio when I'm in traffic. There's a new service called Sling which is offering an abbreviated package of cable channels for streaming, and it includes ESPN which will surely be a big game changer for a lot of people.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 14, 2015 22:11:51 GMT -5
I enjoy live sports enough to stick with cable as part of my phone/internet bundle.... I don't have a cell phone a pay for myself, so I still have a regular house phone... Having Cable in the package only adds about $40/month... it's worth that to me. I also have Amazon Prime, which I find far better than Netflix.... the only time I had Netflix was when I had a free month trial with my PS3 a couple years back, and it was terrible... there was nothing I wanted to watch, and the few things that did had constant techincal difficulties... I think I used it 3 times in the month.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 15, 2015 2:47:36 GMT -5
I haven't had cable in several years, forgot how many. I'd guess and say maybe four. Netflix and Hulu keep me covered for about $30 a month. Also I hate the cable company monopolies.
I'd have HBO Now if it wasn't Apple exclusive. I have a feeling that will change sooner or later though.
The amount of actual TV I watch has dropped significantly, to just a couple hours a week. I keep a slim selection of shows I watch and never have the TV on just because I'm bored. I can hardly believe the amount of garbage I used to watch daily.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 15, 2015 2:50:22 GMT -5
I enjoy live sports enough to stick with cable as part of my phone/internet bundle.... I don't have a cell phone a pay for myself, so I still have a regular house phone... Having Cable in the package only adds about $40/month... it's worth that to me. I also have Amazon Prime, which I find far better than Netflix.... the only time I had Netflix was when I had a free month trial with my PS3 a couple years back, and it was terrible... there was nothing I wanted to watch, and the few things that did had constant techincal difficulties... I think I used it 3 times in the month. I don't do their streaming. It was worthless to me. They'd have a selection of about 50 blockbuster movies, but all of them were old, save two or three. So after I watched the three good movies I hadn't already seen a million times I'd have to root through all that made-for-streaming B movie garbage to find something worthwhile, and would often spend more time trying to find something to watch than actually watch something, until I'd finally settle for Terminator to fall asleep to. But I keep the discs coming to see the recent movies. |
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Apr 15, 2015 4:11:34 GMT -5
I haven't had cable since I was a teenager living in my mother's house. It's a massive expense, and it just caused me to spend far too much time sitting on the couch. I spend enough time doing that in front of a computer already. And, in the age of Netflix and DVDs, the only time I ever really need cable is when I'm following baseball. I settle for radio, though I do wish I could see what was happening.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 15, 2015 4:17:16 GMT -5
Couldn't be further away from cutting the cord - being the UK, I have satellite (for 800 channels of mostly unwatchable TV) and cable for broadband (152Mb/s of internetty goodness).
I'd dearly love to have an alternative to either giving Rupert Murdoch £80/month for TV (which I don't actually watch much except for Sport, QI, and a small number of other things - but my family do), or giving the cable company another £70+ for cable and phone, but they are by far the best options available until fiber-to-the-premises becomes widely available/affordable.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Apr 15, 2015 6:34:54 GMT -5
I enjoy live sports enough to stick with cable as part of my phone/internet bundle.... I don't have a cell phone a pay for myself, so I still have a regular house phone... Having Cable in the package only adds about $40/month... it's worth that to me. I also have Amazon Prime, which I find far better than Netflix.... the only time I had Netflix was when I had a free month trial with my PS3 a couple years back, and it was terrible... there was nothing I wanted to watch, and the few things that did had constant techincal difficulties... I think I used it 3 times in the month. I don't do their streaming. It was worthless to me. They'd have a selection of about 50 blockbuster movies, but all of them were old, save two or three. So after I watched the three good movies I hadn't already seen a million times I'd have to root through all that made-for-streaming B movie garbage to find something worthwhile, and would often spend more time trying to find something to watch than actually watch something, until I'd finally settle for Terminator to fall asleep to. But I keep the discs coming to see the recent movies. Netflix has a lot of content that's worthwhile to me only because we're a family of four. There's always something for my kids (and I'd MUCH prefer my six year old turning Netflix on by herself than handling DVDs and the blu ray player), and my wife is really into a few of the shows they have. We also don't go to the movies much with such small kids, and most of the releases we missed eventually come to Netflix. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 15, 2015 7:32:22 GMT -5
My kids mostly use the Cable on-demand thing... I'm sure it's pretty similar. I don't do movies much... if I'm going to watch TV, I'm much more likely to watch a show than a movie. When I signed up for Amazon Prime, they had just got Star Trek and Doctor Who, so between that and Justified I definitely got my $100 worth the last two years.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Apr 15, 2015 8:02:31 GMT -5
I wish my wife would cancel her Amazon Prime account. I use Amazon a lot, but I just don't see the value.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 15, 2015 8:14:33 GMT -5
If you use it instead of Netflix, it's about the same price. ($99/year = $8.25 per month) Then you also get free 2 day shipping any time you buy anything, which comes in handy when you're buying birthday presents and such.  I think there's now a music and e-book part that gives you access to some stuff, too, though I don't really use either. If you're not using the streaming video part, it's probably not worth it unless you buy ALOT of stuff you need right away. Since you have Netflix, a quick check to see if what you want to watch is on one, the other, or both probably make it clear |
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Post by DE Sinclair on Apr 15, 2015 8:41:15 GMT -5
I'm still on cable and have been for years. I've been mostly satisfied, though the vast majority of channels we get, no one ever watches. My horror story came last fall. I have TV, internet, & land-line phone all through ATT, and have been frustrated by the gradually growing cost. Suddenly one morning around 9 am, everything went dead. No one who was home at the time could get anything to work. When I got home from work, I noticed an ATT truck on our street. After trying to make it all work myself and failing, I went out and talked to the guy in the truck. He said he didn't know about any outages, but he'd seen another ATT guy working on the pole outside our house around the same time our service went out. I called ATT on my cell and explained all this and was told my modem was bad and they'd send another. A couple days waiting, with no TV/internet/phone and the box arrived. I swapped everything out, no change. I called again, and again explained that there had been a guy working on the pole when the service went out. They said they'd send me a new DVR, and wouldn't do anything else until we tried that. On the fifth day without service we received and swapped the DVR, and again no change. I called again, argued with several supervisors before they finally admitted that the cable to our house was failing their testing (which I had been told on every previous call that it passed). They finally agreed that their tech who had been up the pole on the day it failed had accidentally cut our cable. After 5 days being completely cut off, they finally fixed it on the sixth day. In recompense, they offered $20. After a couple more long and heated phone calls where I explained exactly where they could shove their $20 and threatening to drop their service, I finally got them to cut my bill by about a third and increase my cable service by about 100 new channels, plus the $20. Still not happy about the whole thing, but at least they finally did something to make up for it. Next screw up though, and they're history.
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shaxper
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Post by shaxper on Apr 15, 2015 8:43:01 GMT -5
If you use it instead of Netflix, it's about the same price. ($99/year = $8.25 per month) Then you also get free 2 day shipping any time you buy anything, which comes in handy when you're buying birthday presents and such. I think there's now a music and e-book part that gives you access to some stuff, too, though I don't really use either. If you're not using the streaming video part, it's probably not worth it unless you buy ALOT of stuff you need right away. Since you have Netflix, a quick check to see if what you want to watch is on one, the other, or both probably make it clear The Amazon Prime interface on our HD TV is a lot more obnoxious than our Netflix interface, so we only use it as a last resort. I think we've watched one television series through it in the two years we've had it. Definitely not worth it. |
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Post by The Captain on Apr 15, 2015 9:18:35 GMT -5
Much as I would like to, my love of live sports keep me tethered to cable. Due to MLB's stupid and archaic blackout rules, I pretty much need to maintain my cable so that I get ROOT Sports, which carries my beloved Pirates' games, as well as Penguins' games in the winter. If not for live sports, I could easily go with antenna and streaming for my watching desires.
What I would really love is to:
1. Have Verizon FIOS come into our area for television, as they are currently only available for phone and internet. We have Comcast Cable, and I hate them with the fury of 1,000,000 exploding suns. I had FIOS at my previous house and never had an issue with their service, equipment or billing; with Comcast, I've had nothing but trouble, and they have absolutely no incentive or ability to fix it.
2. Dump my land line. This, unfortunately, won't happen because my wife insists on having it, even though we receive zero important calls on it. We both have cell phones, but her worry is that there might be a point where our daughters are home without us, and as neither of them has a cell phone, they would not be able to reach the outside world. As I tell her, however, that by the time I feel comfortable to let our girls stay home alone, at least one if not both of them will have a cell phone, so her argument is moot. Sadly, this is one battle I'm not winning any time soon.
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I think there's now a music and e-book part that gives you access to some stuff, too, though I don't really use either. 
