SENIOR MONEY MATTERS
$3,600 a Year For TV
Is the fixed income I spend on cable and streaming worth it?
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld has a joke about the difference between men’s and women’s television viewing habits. He observes:
“Men don’t care what’s on TV. They only care what else is on TV.”
I can relate. I am an inveterate remote control flipper. With a small rectangular slab of electronics, I can swiftly travel among channels at will, from NBC to ESPN to CNN to TBS to CoziTV to Bravo, and more.
I love TV. I think it’s because my parents banned it when I was a young child in response to things like Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton N. Minow calling television a “vast wasteland” in 1961.
As I grew into my teens, Dad and Mom gave in and got a set. I made up for lost time and became hooked on fare like the vampire soap opera Dark Shadows, early anime cartoon Gigantor, and counterculture comedy fest Laugh-In.
My television obsession continued throughout adulthood, but my addiction is expensive, particularly as I age. The other day I added up what it costs to feed my TV habit. It took some work. Cable and streaming services don’t make it easy to calculate how much you spend on them. There is no rhyme or reason to pricing, just what each thinks it can wring out of the public. But I opened a spreadsheet and persevered.
The shocking grand total? $287.07 per month before fees and taxes, so let’s call it $300 a month all in. That’s a whopping $3,600 a year from a fixed retirement income. Yikes!
Please bear with me for a second on some math.
About 70 percent of that cash is for Xfinity cable. My TV package is $120 per month, which includes home internet. Throw in a sports add-on package and the cost of renting the hardware, and the total is about $195 a month or $2,340 per year, the price of a nice South Carolina beach vacation.
Then there’s streaming. We have the full array: Prime Video ($8.99 a month as part of Amazon Prime); Netflix ($15.49); HBO/Max ($15.99 as part of our cable package); Paramount+ with Showtime ($11.99); AppleTV+ ($9.99 as part of Apple One Premier); Peacock ($2.99, which will change to $4.99 after a special introductory deal is up); and Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ as a package ($26.49). That’s $91.93 per month or $1,103.16 a year for streaming.
I pay $3,600 a year for TV because I am fortunate to have the money, whereas I understand many seniors and others can’t afford that much. Still, that’s a boatload for a retiree on a fixed income to spend for the privilege of watching the “boob tube.”
I am old enough to remember when TV was essentially free. Back then, you’d buy a television set, adjust the rabbit ears, set the vertical hold, and settle in to watch The Six Million Dollar Man, Columbo, or early Saturday Night Live on one of only three broadcast networks (four if you count PBS, founded in 1969).
When cable came along, the quality of reception and the number of channels expanded. We baby boomers found we could have our networks and eat the Hallmark Channel too.
Next, Netflix decided to get out of the business of mailing DVDs to customers and into streaming via the internet. Its success — it has around 270 million subscribers worldwide — prompted others, including TV powers NBC, ABC, and CBS to abandon their traditional broadcast TV business model, which had made them untold billions, and plunge into streaming, too, because they wanted their mature businesses’ stock to be valued like that of hot start-up tech companies.
Now, streaming services have come up with another spectacular innovation: showing commercials on lower-tier plans (unless you pay more to avoid ads). They’re also combining themselves into packages (like the Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ package, the one we get). The brilliant minds of cutting-edge TV tech have invented…uh…cable.
All along the way, cable and streaming have steadily raised prices so, ya, $3,600 out of my retirement budget. I spend that because of two things: Peak TV and sports.
“Peak TV” was coined to refer to the era that encompassed many high-profile, prestige, and movie-like shows over the past quarter century. It includes some of my recent favorites such as Succession, Big Little Lies, Daisy Jones and the Six, The Morning Show, Slow Horses, Mare of Easttown, and Stranger Things. It refers to a particular kind of program, often a limited series, starring big names like Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant, and Riley Keough, Elvis’ granddaughter.
If I want to watch all the best TV today, I need access to everything — the broadcast networks, the cable networks, and the streaming services. Still, I miss some, like hot shows on Starz, BritBox, or AMC+, which we don’t get. I just refuse to pay for even more streaming services; I courageously draw the line at nine.
Now Peak TV is in decline, in part because Warner Bros. Discovery decided to ax the HBO brand, which sparked prestige TV back in 1999 with the debut of The Sopranos. The worry is that their and other services’ focus on profit will mean Peak TV will become what I call “peek TV,” endless looks into the lives of so-called “reality” stars like the Really Rich Real Housewives of Places You Can’t Afford to Live (RRRHPYCAL).
I also pay up for TV because I am a sports junkie. I’ll watch any kind of contest, from football to fütbol. I keep cable because it’s still the best sports source, including the traditional networks CBS and Fox showing the NFL and several channels featuring college football games. I love to flip back and forth among the latter, particularly as time runs out, to catch as much of the action as possible.
My wife, also a sports enthusiast, tolerates this although she is not a fan of my favorite football channel, the commercial-free NFL RedZone, which rapidly switches among pro games to capture “every touchdown” on fall and winter Sunday afternoons. It’s the perfect lazy man’s channel. You don’t even have to raise a finger to push a button; RedZone flips you to the action automatically. Heaven.
Some streaming services now show live sports because they draw a lot of eyeballs at an appointed time. Peacock has the Premier League and, controversially, an NFL playoff game last season (fans didn’t like that they had to pay for a streaming service to see what would normally be on a broadcast network). Max shows March Madness (included) and NBA games (for an extra fee). ESPN+ features the NHL. Prime Video has NFL Thursday Night games.
I hate watching sports on streaming. For one thing, I can’t flip between games as easily as I can on cable, which offers the “Back” or “Last” button. I don’t like to nest on a game. During commercials, I hunt and gather other programming like Jerry Seinfeld, whose new movie Unfrosted, about the invention of Pop-Tarts, premieres May 3.
Also, streaming sports is clunky and slow to load. Many times, Prime Video on our TV suddenly buffers Thursday Night NFL and destroys a dramatic moment in a game. We’re left wondering, Wait, did Patrick hit Travis in the end zone? What is Taylor doing right now? Is she chest-bumping with Brittany? Streaming is simply inferior to cable when it comes to quality of signal and reliability.
The expense of television — particularly the outrageous price of cable — is leading many to cut the cord and rely on alternative providers like Sling TV, Hulu Plus Live TV, YouTubeTV, and FuboTV, which provide a more limited roster of networks. For all that, though, you need to have some sort of internet service to watch on your big screen TV or a phone or tablet. Some thought the future of scripted video was on handheld devices, but that led to spectacular failures (R.I.P., Quibi).
Frankly, as a senior, all the options and combinations make my head hurt. Maybe they’re cool for Gen-Zers, but the thought of patching together different services, TV inputs, and video and sound technologies leaves me paralyzed. This leads me, like many seniors, to stick with the well-known status quo — cable, through which I receive my mess of streaming services — rather than shop around to save money.
But what I get for my TV money is something more valuable than shows and sports.
I happen to be disabled, which reduces my ability to get out and about with my wife and participate in some of her favorite activities, like hiking. I have a rare disease that’s caused painful osteoarthritis from head to toe as I’ve aged. I walk with a cane for short distances and use a wheelchair for longer. Watching TV is something we can do together as a couple despite my handicap.
We don’t just watch; we debate why characters act as they do, comment on the directing, and grouse when there’s an obvious plot hole. It’s not an intellectual exercise like sitting around reading and analyzing Shakespeare. Except, it kind of is.
Currently, we are rewatching the whole run of The Sopranos, which is very Shakespearean. It’s interesting to see the complexity of a depressed mobster’s family life, punctuated with violently whacking people. It reminds me of how powerful TV can be by creating compelling characters by great actors we get to know over, in this case, six seasons.
We also watch series like Abbott Elementary (ABC and Hulu), Palm Royale (AppleTV+), The Sympathizer (Max), and Girls5Eva (Netflix) together. But tracking and viewing the finest entertainment and sports is overwhelming. I keep a “to do” list of shows my wife and I want to get to — it now runs to 277 items.
Today’s TV has done something else for me. It’s inspired me to upgrade myself as I age. Just call me Randall+.
Please send me $9.99 a month.
Randall H. Duckett is writing a book about the emotions of chronic pain and invites fellow sufferers to share their stories. He is also the author of Seven Cs: The Elements of Effective Writing (available on Amazon). He can be reached at randall@hurtfeelings.life.
