Well, They Have Finally and Officially Lost It!

Who are "they" and, what is "it" that they lost?

"They" are were my Cable TV / ISP.

What they lost were their minds and, a YUGE chunk of my business!

It started about 2 years ago when, the cable company went "Digital" and encrypted all TV signals, as a result of that move, every television had to be connected to a "Box" (at a cost) to de-scramble the signal; I went down to one television set connected to cable.

I received a letter stating that Television service for my "Bundled plan" would be increasing to one hundred bucks ($100.00 plus equipment lease fees and taxes :angry:) per month for me to watch the two (only two!) channels that that interest me. Upon reading the letter, I snatched all the wires out and off the cable box and promptly returned it to the the company.

I dropped the phone line and, the cable television feed leaving me with only a Internet connection from the cable company.

Withdrawal symptoms from MSNBC were almost crippling until I found the shows I watched being streamed over YouTube; I can get a little bit of the fix daily between 9:00 pm and 11:59 pm.

The cable companies have overplayed their hand, I dropped from $200.00 monthly "TV-Phone-Internet" bill to $69.00 for Internet alone.

.

i pay 47 Euro's for 40/4 internet, cable with HD content of 56 channels and phone connection with calls in the Netherlands free of charge. and FM channels for the radio digital with 100 stations.
No restriction of internet data use as well, 40/4 is the slowest connection here, 200/50 fastest private use, with 1000/500 for company use.
( that will cost you more....)
Having an motorized 1.2 meter dish i get 5000 HD/UHD channels free, and 4000+ digital radio channels.
Now i'm looking for 2000+ hours in a day.... :mrgreen:

The US is a land of where the attitude is to just rape all your customers as hard as you can while paying congress to make it legal to rape us harder.
This isn't hyperbole. It's simply a sad truth.

If this is what they mean by making America great, I vote for when it sucked. (if there ever really was a time when it sucked more than now)

I cut the cable years ago. A little Netflix, a little YouTube, some torrent activity where required and some OTA and I do OK. I also have a Plex server and a Roku and a Kodi box.

I haven't had any form of TV here in many decades. As far as entertainment goes I get my satisfying fix of old movies, TV shows, music, etc. via the Internet. And if the need arises I can always subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, etc.

I also cut the cable last October when I moved from the city to the sticks. This was made tolerable by the fact that I'm so far out now that no cable providers can reach me and have no plans to for some time. The only mistake I made was going to Hughes Net for satellite internet. Talk about raping people! The lowest level of service they have 50/25, has a data cap and only costs $80 a month! Oh I can buy more data but then we're talking over $100 a month for crappy service that dies when it rains and a moden that has one of the weakest wife's I've ever encountered. So I'm in a fight with Hughes Net to drop my service (the guy who installed was drunk and didn't;t explain the whole deal, some of that fault lies with me) with a termination fee of $270! Since I have another year at $89 a month that almost 1k. To pay the $270 may be the best option to get them out of my house!

I can use unlimited data on my cell phone for $40 a month, get a better connection which translates to better speed. I also have an outside antenna and pre-amplifier so I can get several channels of local anyway.

I guess what I'm really saying is don't go with Hughes Net, they are a bigger rip off than cable companies, something I thought was impossible!

TV licence here (terrestrial still) is about $12 per month, this gives more digital channels than anyone could want, we only watch up to one of four as most of them are c**p. I'm happy to download BBC programs from their iPlayer (not available in the US) as it's very good quality. Internet is about 16mbps as present but sometimes a bit noisy and I'd have to do much messy wiring to get it to the main TV.