I cut the cord about four years ago. I was seeking to pair down my personal budget and had asked Cox Cable about offering me the rates that they offer new customers. Having been with Cox over 10 years, I figured if they wanted my business, they'd settle and take less. When I was denied the low rate for a customer who never gave Cox a dime, I asked Cox to remove some services - the customer service rep was a snotty cunt and she told me to take my digital cable box back to them. I did her better, I hung up on the cow, and removed their shit from my house and took it to their nearest outlet location and told the nice lady there to make sure a note on the account places the blame of me totally getting rid of cable tv to the nasty woman who was on the phone with me.
I'm no idiot. Before taking the drastic step of cutting the cable, I had done my research. I knew that I could buy a digital box that would take a signal from an inexpensive flat tv antenna and translate those signals to my then old world flat panel tv which could do HDTV but nothing more. With a little over $50 in hardware (my monthly budget for what Cox could have gotten), I managed to get digital tv over the air and the quality was amazing (over the air tv is not compressed like digital cable, so on a great day, the picture was superior to the dumbed down shit Cox was serving); of course when it rained, the results were subpar.
But I was now on my own captaining the good ship cord cutter.
It was another month or so when I had another $50 to spend and I had done research - there was a fledgling operation coming out of Dishtv that was called "Slingtv" - it offered 20 or so channels for $19.95 and I could take the service with me on a tablet or laptop as well as on my tv through an hdmi cable from the laptop to the television. At this point I had not even purchased my first smartphone.
Slingtv has been a great company - over time they steadily improved their service and added packages so that for around $40 per month, I could get sports channels, popular cable channels, and news channels that made the whole thing worthwhile.
At this point there was virtually no competition to Slingtv.
But a funny thing happens in technology. Competitors could smell the blood in the water with cable television companies losing subscribers like whores turning tricks, and pretty soon there were television packages much like Sling - some had as many or fewer channels - many had different ones which I didn't like.
I also need to disclose that I also had subscribed to Netflix and to Hulu for different reasons, but when Youtube really started to grow, I ditched both Netflix and Hulu and just went with Slingtv.
Until today.
Out of the clear blue I had read an article on Hulu now offering "live tv" and went to see for myself. Not only did Hulu offer practically every channel I was getting on Slingtv, it was $5 less per month! I am a bean counter like no one else, so that money means something to me. That is $60 a year! And Hulu also threw in 50 hours of DVR for free which cost another $5 per month extra on Sling. And then there was the Hulu library of unique shows that I had liked (and missed) that was also part of the package - so instead of spending $9 a month for Hulu standing alone like I had done, that was no longer extra money on top of the Slingtv $45 per month.
So today I decided to cut Slingtv out of the picture and to reduce my financial footprint by $5 per month and I went to Hulu.
I do miss the wonderful graphical layout of Sling that made seeing what is on a breeze and the easy of going through the channels as easy as well. Hulu's interface is not as nice. But Hulu has so much more on demand that you can see that it reminded me of why I had the service to begin with.
And then there are original Hulu programs that I remember and liked.
Check out Hulu for 2 weeks free, on me!
Plans start at $7.99 after 1st 2 weeks.
Terms apply. https://mbsy.co/nbgdM
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