It’s Time We Talked About Your Cable Subscription
I was paying for service I didn’t need out of habit. Here’s how I stopped.
I’m old, and I live in a neighborhood filled with old people. I know the table at the park where the old guys gather to tell lies, and I know the local old-people restaurant. I shop with my cohort on old-people discount day at the grocery store.
I thought I knew every nook and cranny of my community, where old people could be found. But I was wrong.
A few days ago, I needed to go to the office of the company that provides my cable TV and internet. Although it was near my house, I normally handled issues with my cable TV over the phone. When I got there, I was directed to a set of couches and told there would be a thirty-minute wait. I sat down, looked around, and realized the place was filled with my people. The only ones under sixty were the employees.
From where I waited, I could overhear the conversations at the kiosks between the young salespeople and the old customers. My people, the old ones, were being sold goods and services they didn’t and couldn’t use. They were being ripped off.
I love TV. I have loved TV since my parents got their first one, a black-and-white TV that got two channels. I would sneak out of bed at night and peer through a heating grate in the floor of the upstairs hall to watch whatever they were watching on TV.
I watched broadcast TV using rabbit ears or rooftop antennas for years. When cable TV became a thing, I was right there to get all those channels and a clear signal, no matter what the weather. I still tune in every night for the local news, the national news, and an episode of Jeopardy.
As the internet matured, I knew that I didn’t need cable TV to watch the news and Jeopardy, but nevertheless, I dutifully paid a shockingly high cable TV bill. I didn’t like it, but my wife and I, over the decades, had become accustomed to the controller and the screen interface that our cable TV subscription provided. We didn’t want to learn a different one.
We were paying high cable prices, not because of the content, but because we were used to the hand-held controller.
I got both my internet and TV from our cable company. I owned the cable modem that brought me internet and the router that turned it into Wi-Fi for the house. Those things were old and becoming obsolete, as electronics do, so one weekend when my spouse was out of town I replaced the entire system with newer stuff.
Once the new equipment was in place, I yanked the cable TV box and signed up for YouTube TV. It was the most expensive and most feature-rich of the streaming options that provide local channels, but still cheaper than cable. When I went to the office of the cable company, it was to turn in the cable box and end all services except internet.
I’d had a monthly cable TV and internet subscription that ran about $230 per month. After dumping the cable box, I pay $80 for internet and $82 for YouTube TV. That is a saving of $68 a month and over $800 in a year. It has been a few days now. Jeopardy and the news shows are all coming in just fine.
Cable TV is an old-people product. The median age of a cable TV subscriber is sixty-five years old, and 81% of people older than that have a cable TV subscription. It is my suspicion that many of my people are clinging to cable TV for the same reason I did. It’s what we are used to. It may be overpriced, but we have money. We saved it up and are retired. We want to do what’s comfortable.
On the other hand, paying out money we don’t have to, or for services we don’t or can’t use, is offensive to any of us who were once poor.
Here’s the deal. Internet service at 300 mbps, the basic service, will allow you to stream the kind of TV we old people watch and provide Wi-Fi to all our phones, laptops, desktops and other connected devices. Years ago I got talked into “gig” speeds and only recently discovered that nothing in my house could use that much bandwidth.
Don’t rent any equipment. Buy your own on Amazon. It’s all easy to install these days.
Several streaming services provide the three national networks, sports, movie channels and news from every conceivable political viewpoint. YouTube TV is the most robust and most expensive, but it is better and far cheaper than what my cable company offered.
The action these days is in streaming. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Max, Hulu. These are additional subscriptions, so watch yourself. I have in the past signed up for one of these to watch one show, forgotten about it, and then paid for months without watching anything. For movies, my local library offers Kanopy and Hoopla with an amazing number of movies and other shows at no charge.
I have close friends who never watch television. How do I know that? They tell me every chance they get.
I don’t want to wean anyone — particularly my favorite people — old people, off TV. I have every intention of spending my last hours on this earth watching sports on television, and until then I will continue watching those shows like the network news, shows sponsored by drug companies that know the only people watching are old people. I just don’t want to pay more than necessary to do it.
That cable connection is no longer necessary. When practicing elder law, I dealt with a lot of financial elder abuse. I know what it looks like. And what it looks like is what I saw the other morning in the office of my cable company. In some cases of financial elder abuse the abusers have to be stopped. In others, the elders have to stop being victims. We need to dump the cable TV, get basic internet, refuse upsells, own our equipment, and take the hour or so it takes to get used to a new controller.
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