I’ve been a rabbit ear kind of gal since I moved out of the parental home, but a few years after I sustained a brain injury, I had to admit I was watching a lot of TV – couldn’t do much else – and rabbit ear fare just wasn’t cutting it. Plus I needed a TV in the bedroom. So I switched to Rogers, an easy way to feed a signal to the new HD LCD. I had tried to go Bell satellite first, but I couldn’t even get past the come-out-and-install-a-satellite phase. Rogers came out within 2 days, and before I knew it, I had cable…well, after 6 hours of trying to figure out how to see it on my TV and have it play nice with my VCR/DVD, that is.
But our honeymoon didn’t last long. First the selling price was really a mirage, designed to get you to the well and start drinking from it. Worse, for those first few months, I had no idea what my bill would be. Between offers, special deals, and whatever, my bill for VIP TV with HD kept fluctuating. Finally, it settled down, and it was nowhere near the original selling price of $20. Nowhere. First off, no one in Toronto gets Rogers that cheap…in the last few years anyway. But that doesn’t stop Rogers from telling a Torontonian the cheapest price they offer in the country as if that’s what we’ll pay. Haha. Then Rogers settled down to giving themselves over-inflation raises. My bill went from costly to exorbitant. With each raise, I dropped a service in a futile effort to keep my bill within nonexistent inflation. Then Rogers passed on the LPIF (or whatever the acronym is) fee that the CRTC said they could not pass on. Of course, the CRTC has done diddley squat to stop em.
After the last raise and the fee, I began thinking of cutting the cord and returning to my first love: rabbit ears. But how to do it and still see my favourite Space programs? That was the conundrum. I thought and thought and thought. Forgot. Got my Rogers bill. Grumbled. Thought some more. Read lots. Forgot. Got my Rogers bill. Pissed. Tried thinking of how to disconnect again. Finally, I was introduced to the SOLVE method of solving a problem: State the prob; Options; Listen to advice; something, something. It was the first three lines of the acronym that clarified the problem for me, told me what I knew were the options, and showed me what I had yet to learn in order to cut that cord!
Then I got my Rogers bill, added up the monthly drain, and OMG, I’m paying how much per year?!!!
That shock got the grey cells working, and it suddenly dawned on me that I could connect my computer to my TV, and wow, what a picture I could get. But when I heard that Stargate Universe was having its Fall Finale on December 3rd, the cord cutting date became today.
As of this moment, I have divorced cable (pending the 30-day advance notice period Rogers insists on, with the added enticement of a 30% discount on lots of goodies). And I am already catching up on my No Ordinary Family viewing.
Comments
I love that we can get SPACE shows online, but I'm not impressed by the quality of CTV's streaming feed. I'll make use of it on my computer when I need to, but I can't see watching it on my HDTV.
That being said, with Stargate Universe I guess that isn't a problem, since with the DP's obsession with low contrast and low lighting levels on that show, it's not like you can see anything anyway. *grumble*
I hear you about the low lighting! But I would've thought all that dark lighting would mean a bigger need for seeing it in HD. I was thinking of going the iTunes route for Stargate but I have a few months to figure that out. The irony of Space's feed being bad is the main CTV feed is the best of all the stations.