Last April I told you about how I canceled cable and was living on over-the-air HD and Blu-ray Discs for my families HD needs. At the time my plan was to add cable in time for football season. It was a great plan and it kind of worked, but I did fail to consider one thing; at Engadget I write about cable related technologies. My first clue was actually not long after my post here about my first 90 days of success when Digeo sent me a Moxi HD DVR for review. At that point my plan was to add the service back in order to do the review and then to cancel it again, but that turned out to be too much of a pain since Verizon requires I send the CableCARD back when I cancel, which of course means another truck roll the next time I need service. But despite this I was still prepared to call and cancel right after CES, but by the time I got back I realized that in the next six months there would be at least three or four new CableCARD devices I’d like to review, so I decided to give up on the idea.
The bottom line is that I love me some football in HD, so I can’t ever see myself going without cable year round, and with the hassle involved in canceling and signing back up, the $327 a year ($62 for 7 months minus $110 savings for signing a contract) I’d save just isn’t worth it — not to mention I plan to expense the majority of the cost to offset my blogging income. I suspect for many it just isn’t worth it either. Sure there is lots of content out there available via other legal means, but the bottom line is that when it comes down to it, cable really isn’t that bad of a deal considering all the HD viewing options you get for the price.
That is exactly what I have learned too. Fios is pretty cheap when everything is bundled. I think canceling cable is great for students etc who are on a really tight budget. Sports in HD makes it worthwhile though for most people.
Wow – I recently cut the cord and have had the exact opposite response. I realized that other than a few Laker games on TNT and ESPN, I’m really not missing anything. When I consider that I’m saving $600 a year, I figure I could rent a lot of Blu-ray if I wanted to. I still have Netflix, so that’s kind of like cable and with TiVo I get OTA signals, so that makes life easier than having a Moxi DVR, but I’d rather spend the money going to a sports bar with friends than to waste it on content that I’m just not using. Not sure what type of reception you’re getting, but with my new HD antenna, I still get a lot of HD sports that I can pay attention to.
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”
The Godfather II
sorry to hear that me a reader of both this blog and engadgethd caused your experiment to fail but im very excited to read reviews on the hd home run and the new ceton box. Curious what the other 2 cable card devices you plan to test are unless your counting different models from each company. Also on the truck roll i’m wondering how you plan to avoid that for every cable device you have to set up. For the life of me i couldn’t get cox to just let me pick up cable cards and have them authorized myself on my tivo. I ended up having to walk the tech through the process just the same but considering the fact that you may have to pay for truck rolls for each new cable card you have configured you may want to continue your experiment. You can at least write of those truck rolls.
The other two are a new TiVo (I’m guessing here) and I plan to look at the Moxi DVR again.
And FiOS doesn’t pair the CableCARD to the hardware so I can just pull it out of one device and pop it in the next and it works.