The New Tradition: Turn On and Tune Out
One sure sign that I’m not the only living person who absolutely despises large family gatherings over the holidays: the number of holiday-related Dish Network offers that have arrived in the mail this past week, each one promising speedy installation with multi-room reception.
After toying with the idea of cutting off cable TV’s pipeline to our bank account, I’ve finally checked with several neighbors who have Dish Network. Every one of them reports excellent reception except during snowstorms, but as I know from personal experience even cable reception gets iffy during that kind of weather and it’s constantly bad if we ever want to watch anything on TBS. Not that there’s much worth watching unless you’re a Braves fan or just can’t bear to miss another repeat of “Saved by the Bell”.
As far as the price? They’re paying less than half of what cable demands of us every month. (Yeah, I still have issues with paying for television.)
It’s too late to sign up for installation prior to Thanksgiving, but there always seems to be one or more Dish Network offers arriving in the mail these days, and I intend to take advantage of the very next one we receive.
Now I just hope cable doesn’t go out during the Detroit Lions game on Thursday (or, more importantly to me, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade) or else I’m going to be gassing a road runner while I’m cooking my turkey.
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*never tease someone who is dieting* *never tease someone who is dieting* *never tease...
We love our DirecTV. Check your email.
I’m looking forward to loving ours. I just can’t get over the fact that the channels we watch most on cable currently cost us $69.95 per month, plus another $8 per month for 2 regular cable boxes AND another $10 per month for a DVR box, oh and ALSO another $2.95 per month for their damn Cable TV Guide which we don’t want and automatically put in the kindling box. That’s $90.91 every month for television!
Meanwhile, the same setup (minus many channels we don’t watch) through Dish is $39.95… with 6 months free.
I’d like to strangle that road runner.
Comcast is our local cable monopoly. We have them for broadband internet only as we are on the far, far end (18,000 feet from the TCO) of DSL. We had DSL through Covad and when we wanted to switch to AT&T or something else we found that we couldn’t get DSL at our house. Yes, we had DSL but couldn’t get it…
So we went cable. But only for internet. I won’t do phone (how do you call when the cable’s out?) and we love our DirecTV for entertainment. It seemed that everytime Comcast “upgraded” its service, we see a decline so we switched to satellite. But satellite broadband is very expensive and not better than dsl speed wise so that’s what we’ll get when its the ONLY option for high speed versus the dreaded dial-up.
We may be able to get off the Comcast teat again soon as AT&T is getting closer and closer with the FiOs lines! Definitely within 6 months and probably more like 3 or maybe the start of the new year! Yay!
Simple solution, broadcast TV, don’t pay for cable
Perhaps its easier for me to say that since I’v enever had cable so don’t know what I am missing
We wouldn’t get ANY channels then, Ed.