If you want to cancel the cable, try calling again a few times and seeing if different customer service reps give you different cancellation fee quotes. I don’t know WTF these companies are doing, but we had this experience with DirecTV ($0, then $300, then $150 or something) and my friend just had the same thing with Time Warner. It’s kind of like playing Press Your Luck!
We have a home theater PC that uses a Hauppage card to connect to the antenna and Windows Media Center to record shows. WMC also allows us to put our DVDs on the computer, which makes it a lot more convenient to watch them (and significantly reduces the clutter around the TV). Then of course we can just go online and watch Netflix or Hulu. (Or on one occasion bring up the local Chinese restaurant menu so everyone could pick what they wanted.)
I’m delighted to see that iTunes offers Dr. Who episodes not just for purchase at $2.99 a pop, but for rental (30 days, or 24 hours after you start watching) for $0.99 each. I’m really hoping that more cable shows become available in this way. I’d happily pay directly to watch True Blood even in a slightly delayed time frame, rather than having to wait for a whole frickin year for the season to come out on DVD. But I’m not going to buy cable, then buy HBO, just to watch one show.
Anyway, to give you an idea of how it works, we have to decide tonight if we want to catch up on Burn Notice or Warehouse 13 on Hulu, if we want to watch NBC’s Thursday night stuff on the DVR, or if we want to watch an actual DVD of Fringe. If I want to fold laundry and be entertained before hubby gets home, I’ll fire up The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on Watch Instantly, or perhaps Veronica Mars. We never feel like we’re out of stuff to watch.
This is why you should bag your cable. The bastards want you to pay them for not delivering a service to you anymore? Eff that, I say. I loathe the way the cable companies – all of them – treat their customers. Let them go bankrupt if they can’t stop lying and cheating us.
People have made some great suggestions above, to which I would only add use your local library. I bet you can borrow the entire season’s worth of Mad Men on DVD.
Generally, when you sign a contract that’s worth a certain amount, say $50 a month for a term of a year, you owe the other party the full amount. Even if you decide you don’t want the service after 3 months, you owe them a total of $600, since that’s what you promised in the contract. Usually the cable company doesn’t hold you to that standard, but will have a sliding scale termination fee, which presumably is written out in the contract as well.
But I agree with your overall premise - for years, I have maintained that Time Warner is The Devil, and DirecTV wasn’t fabulous either. Production companies are going to have to suss out a whole new way of funding shows, because the traditional ways of watching TV are dying, in part due to the buttheadedness of the provider companies.
We haven’t had cable for a number of years, and don’t miss it. We have Netflix. Between DVDs and streaming (legal) video from hulu.com, Netflix, etc., there isn’t enough time to watch all the things I’d like to watch anyway.
