cutting the cord

Well, as of last month, we are without cable television.

I was reluctant to cut the cord. Believe you me, I was reluctant to do it. For one thing, the first people in my social sphere to get rid of their cable were ... really annoying. These were the people who would rent Firefly or Battlestar Galactica or something years after cancellation, and then complain that TV always canceled the good shows. I get that everyone has to prioritize their entertainment budget differently: nothing wrong with that. But something matters to you or it doesn't. If it matters to you, then you know how it works -- take your money out of the system where the money is collected, and you need to realize that the system is not going to cater to your tastes anymore. This is a TV blog, so I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but Jesus fucking Christ already.

For another, I mean, I like TV. And it's only pretty recently that you could actually still watch TV without having cable or a digital antenna (and most of the good stuff is on cable, so...) I like live sports and live spectacles like the Oscars.

Here's what I don't like, though: I don't fucking like Comcast.

Like most of the country, we don't have a choice of cable TV providers, and we don't live in a Verizon Fios service area. Our options are cable, satellite, and cutting the cord. Satellite means a two year commitment for something we can't try out first, from a company that keeps playing chicken with Viacom, AMC Networks, et cetera. Cutting the cord was a crapshoot. So for a long time it was cable, which meant Comcast.

But two things happened.

First, the bill kept going up. And because two of the channels we wanted the most -- TCM and Sundance -- were only available in the Extended Super Special Whizbang package, we got that package, because if you're going to pay a lot for cable, why pay a lot and not even get the channels you want the most?

And if you're already paying a lot for cable, why not bundle and get HBO and Showtime and all that for an extra fifteen bucks?

And so on, and between that and the internet, our bill was in the neighborhood of $200-250, depending on whether or not I had recently called and threatened to cancel.

The second thing goes back to before I even moved in here.

We live in a three-floor townhouse condo. The way the cable was installed at some unknown date before I moved in is ... unusual, and not good. For one thing, the signal is strongest in the loft, which is only used for storage, and weakens as it descends each floor, meaning it's weakest on the ground floor -- where the living room is, where we watch TV. This was worse at one point because of a lot of unnecessary splitters, but it's not great even now. We have to have the modem and router on the second floor, because on the ground floor the signal would be too weak, but putting the modem in on the loft would put the router too far from everything that needs to communicate with it.

I'm convinced there's some other systemic problem beyond that, something in the walls or where the cable enters the building. But here's the thing: Comcast has confirmed many times over the years that there is a problem with the way our cable is installed. This is immediately followed with "but we can't do anything about it, because it's not our responsibility to fix it." As far as they're concerned, since it was installed before I moved in, I can't prove that the previous owners didn't request a strange and purposefully bad cable installation, and their position is that they would not install cable so weirdly without being asked to do so.

I have had so many conversations with them about this.

Now, every time the Comcast cable box gets upgraded, it also gets more bandwidth-hungry. It does more and more, and it needs more and more. The upgrade to the X1 wasn't the tipping point -- we had been having trouble with Comcast's service all along -- but it started to lead to periodic outages, where we were still receiving a signal (internet worked), but not a strong enough one for the X1 to load up everything it needed to function. The program guide would freeze. Attempting to change the channel or access the DVR would make everything seize up, and stay seized up for hours even after rebooting. You could turn it on and watch whatever channel it was already on, but as soon as you tried to do anything else, you might lose cable TV for the rest of the day.

So you put those two things together, and you see the situation, right? We were overpaying for a shitty product, like goddamn college students.

That was the last straw. I mean, we had been talking about cutting the cord since Mad Men ended, and were leaning hard towards doing it once Rectify ended. But that was it. It was time to say goodbye.

We're still in that post-cable transition period right now, figuring out what we're doing instead. We were already subscribers to various streaming services. So here's the breakdown of what's what in the TvLDR household right now:

PS Vue:

This is a cable-like service offered by Playstation, accessible through your Playstation, but not (I think) actually requiring a Playstation (you can do it through Roku or Apple TV or things like that, I believe). It's a streaming service offering both live and On Demand cable and network television, as well as a limited DVR (DVR recordings expire after 4 weeks). There are several tiers of programming, with the option to add premium channels like HBO.

Pros:

Not only is it easier to get to the "minimum tier we need that has the channels we want" with PS Vue than Comcast, it has a few channels Comcast doesn't, notably Boomerang, which I had harangued both Comcast and Cox to get for years, to no avail. This is the first time I have ever been a Boomerang subscriber! Alas, it's no longer the 1970s Hanna Barbera wonderland it was at launch, but as an animation fan who works at home, I definitely appreciate the morning blocks of Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry.

Cons:

1: PS Vue is not a cable provider. As a result, when it comes to the networks, it has to negotiate with each affiliate separately for the rights to live streaming. If they haven't secured those rights in your market, you're stuck with On Demand content and watching things the next day -- which, with the exception of CBS shows and a couple of others, you could mostly do on Hulu at a lesser cost. For instance, in our market, CBS is the only network we have live.

1a: They also don't have all the networks: one or two of the Big Four are missing in some markets, if I remember right from the advertising page we looked at before signing up, and the CW is missing entirely. The CW also has its own free app you can watch their shows on a day later, but it means no live streaming of the DC superhero shows, iZombie, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, etc.

2: The Viacom-owned channels - MTV, VH-1, Nickelodeon, TV Land, etc - were just removed, and with very little warning. For most customers, the big deal here seems to be the loss of Nick, because of their kids' programming. It's also maybe an indication of how unstable PS Vue programming could be.

3: It can be buggy. Rectify is the number one reason we got PS Vue, but the DVR has consistently fucked up in its attempt to record it, and although the show is available On Demand through PS Vue, that's been buggy too. What's more, the bugs don't go away -- we had to watch episode two of this season on Sundance's website because, weeks later, the On Demand episode on PS Vue is still the same Behind the Scenes thing instead.

4: The Playstation controller is a lousy TV remote, and the official Playstation media remote sold separately is both expensive (as these things go) and poorly reviewed.

Netflix:

I mean, you know this one. Clearly we're going to keep Netflix.

Pros:

In quantity and quality, Netflix's original content is king. Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Lady Dynamite, Love, Bojack Horseman, Orange is the New Black, Wet Hot American Summer, I'd keep it for those shows alone, nevermind the library of old shows, nevermind movies. Despite Hulu, Netflix is still Destination Alpha for binge-watching everything from the West Wing to Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

At least for now.

Cons:

As Netflix moves towards its ambition of "50% original content," that means a tiny bit of increasing its amount of original content but mostly a metric fuckhaul of "dropping stuff from our catalogue." Who knows what exactly they'll end up keeping. Presumably the mechanics will be similar to what happened to their DVD selection when streaming began to rise, when they stopped replacing some of the less popular discs. So maybe they'll always have the West Wing but maybe not Kolchak? It remains to be seen.

Hulu:

We have the ad-free version of Hulu. Hulu, I think most people are familiar with, has a relatively deep catalogue of both current TV (including current season shows available a day later), older TV (thirtysomething!), and British TV, and a smaller catalogue of movies which I rarely dip into.

Pros:

The above, basically. If you like TV, Hulu has a lot of it.

Cons:

1: They recently changed the interface, and the Watchlist is more annoying than the old Queue, but what're you gonna do.

2: When it comes to older shows, it can be frustrating to realize they don't have all of it. They have like one season of St Elsewhere, for instance, and only three seasons of Hill Street Blues and The Practice.

3: Much less original content than Netflix, and I'm not sure any of it is in the same league, though Difficult People is very good and there is some promising stuff in development. But really, this is the service you get to binge-watch older stuff, or to watch current stuff because you no longer have a cable subscription.

4: That said, neither CBS nor CW current episodes are available through Hulu.

Amazon Prime Video:

We were going to have Amazon Prime one way or the other, so the existence of their streaming service is just an added bonus.

Pros:

1: Some of the original content is good. Red Oaks is light fun, the first season of Transparent was great, and we'll finish The Man in the High Castle eventually.

2: There are some surprising gems among the free movies from time to time.

Cons:

1: The interface is fucking awful, though this is true for most of Amazon across the board.

2: The original shows can seem really cheap at times compared to other streaming services. What I've seen of Good Girls Revolt seems more like a network's poor attempt at emulating Mad Men circa 2009 than the premium dramas we've come to expect from streaming services.

Acorn:

A lesser-known streaming service, Acorn hosts British TV shows generally unavailable elsewhere in the US, as well as a small number of Australian shows and HBO Asia's Serangoon Road. I originally signed up for a free trial intending just to watch Blandings, but became hooked on it.

Pros:

1: There is a hell of a lot of good stuff, even if -- like me -- you are bored by serial killer and detective shows. Not just recent British stuff, but things like the original Upstairs Downstairs and Poldark.

2: It's cheaper than any of the rest by far, at five bucks a month.

Cons:

1: Unless you're an expat, chances are you haven't heard of the vast majority of the offerings, and rather than browsing through the entire catalogue, it's worth just Googling "Best British television" or some such, and then seeing how many of those shows are offered here.

2: ... you will discover many of them are not. I don't know enough about British TV studios or channels to know if it's simply that Acorn mainly licenses from a small handful of them, or if their streaming content mirrors the shows that are available on DVD, or what.