I've been debating one of my roommates about discontinuing our cable service with Comcast. I'd like to get rid of it. She'd like to find a cheaper alternative. Right now, the three of us—her, our other roommate, and I—pay over $90 a month for extended basic cable, HBO, and HD service, so roughly $30 a month for each of us.
My viewing habits pertain almost exclusively to HBO and FOX on Sunday nights with the occasional 60 minutes or the History channel thrown in there. To the best of my knowledge, my roommate watches a few shows on USA with any regularity and gets into Shark week on Discovery. ...Then of course there's the Steelers, which no Pittsburgher can really do without.
I'm excluding from this the casual watching behavior—the times when the TV goes on because we've just come back from our day and have no other pressing task. Of the three of us and like probably all guys in the industrialized world, I'm probably the one who engages in this behavior the most. This is time I really seek to reclaim. I don't enjoy being the passive consumer. I'd much rather create something: a Ph.D. thesis, a blog post, some software, a good idea, an argument (the good kind), an actual meal, a custom home automation system, etc. ...Or, as a much more likely scenario, I'd rather sit and be present.
This, however, doesn't make a compelling argument to my roommates who can generally avoid the enticing, empty void that is TV's escape (men love "the nothing").
Unfortunately, the monetary argument doesn't work on my roommate either. With any service or purchase, the basic question is "Is it worth the price"? In the case of cable TV, is the few shows that the three of us watch really worth $90/month, $1100/year. Do those shows provide that much joy, laughter, or insight. My answer is absolutely not. The Comcast COO, when asked about this situation and whether an a la carte selection scheme would be possible, smugly replied that the current situation is a "good business model." To that, I'd like to respond with two words in addition to cutting out cable altogether, and they begin with the letters F and Y.
This brings me to Apple and Google TV, which are the new wave of devices with the promise of extending the very-much-needed giant middle finger to the cavalcade of dicks that are the service providers in the U.S., Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, etc. I have had a PC connected to my TV for the better part of a decade now. In that time, we've slowly gained the ability to access a good deal of content over the Internet directly from the broadcasting networks, either from iTunes or the appropriate websites. This has done little to persuade my roommate to cut our cable. She isn't the most technical of people and has yet to really exploit all that the living room PC has to offer (something for which I can't really fault anyone). My hope was that the simpler, easier user interface that the new Apple or Google services may offer in accessing all the potential web content would appeal to my roommate(s).
But I am once again thwarted because, of these two services at the moment, FOX and ABC are going with Apple and Time Warner (for HBO) is going with Google. That's all we really know so far. So, for my roommate, no word on USA or Discovery. And yet, it's the Steelers that give my roommate concern as well. Where trying to explain the concept of local, free-air broadcast transmissions (what happened before cable) in their shiny new digital format that will carry the Steelers into our home long after cable leaves it, seems to confuse her a bit as well.
Yet the potential is there. These services could provide an alternative to the broadcast networks for major league sports. Where's the Apple TV Steelers NFL package for my roommate. The NFL: Want the NFL? go to the N... err... go to CBS... who has a multi-year multibillion dollar contract with them, leaving my roommate without the one single web-enabled device to access it all.
It's hard for me to really take the perspective of those who might be confused or even a little frightened by all the technology around them. I'm not necessarily grouping my roommate in with them, but, as these different methods of accessing the all same content mount up, I can understand that it gets more and more difficult to really ask (1) for some trust in disrupting our lifestyle and (2) to get up the learning curve on some new technology. It's easier to just stick with a business model that works. I get that.
For now, I'm stuck paying for a service I don't want from a company I'd rather piss on... voting with the dollar seems more effective than voting in November these days.
