Cord Cutting - A journey Part 1

I am embarking on a great venture - cutting the cord on our TV service. I will occasionally write about this here, including the trials and tribulations (as well as successes) as I move along.  For some time now we've had our TV service with our local phone co-op, and have generally been happy with it. Recently though we've discovered that when our contract was coming up for renewal the price of service had increased dramatically. This is not news to most people who subscribe to cable, particuarly as the carriage charges for local television have recently increased greatly.

This is very disappointing in our household. I would say our TV viewing habits are about 70% PBS, 10% watching Turner Classic Movies, and 20% using our Roku box for various over the top services.  Oh - and local news and Big Bang Theory.  We were getting a ridiculous number of TV stations on our cable, and watching almost none of them. We had come to the conclusion that we just were not willing to pay so much money for the few channels we watched, and which we watched sporadically at that.

We're in never-never land at the moment on this.  I've cut back our cable subscription to the bare minimum and for the time being we are keeping it. At the same time I have bought a very nice TV antenna that seems to work remarkably well in our rural spot, at least from some early testing from sticking it in the window.

I am still getting up the courage to climb up on the roof and install this puppy properly, which has been slowed down by the alternating sweltering heat and downpours of rain recently.

Why, I hear you ask, are you still keeping your cable service?  One reason and one reason only. We have a ludicrous amount of video stored up on the DVR box that we have recorded and never managed to watch.  We're working on that and as soon as we get rid of the stuff we don't think is replaceable, we will cancel our cable service entirely. So the plan currently is to keep the cable service through the summer, get the shows watched, and then move on to cancel the cable service. In the next column I will talk about what we are using to replace the cable service. By the way, I have found that the Cord Cutter's News web site has been extremely helpful in making decisions about what to do as we cut the cord. Link is below.