I pay $18/month for my gym membership. The hours stink, half the time it's self-service to get a locker, there are only two elliptical machines, and the TVs are positioned awkwardly over the treadmill area so depending on which treadmill you choose, you might be straining your neck to view the monitor.
But it's $18/month. I don't complain.
On the other hand! This news made me quite livid. Of the hundred or so channels I have access to right now, I watch about ten on a regular basis (five of which are network channels). Why can't I pay, say, $1/month per channel I watch, and maybe $5/month for HBO, Sundance, etc., instead of paying a set rate for those plus several ESPN channels, several Spanish channels, E!, Lifetime, SpikeTV, sixteen news channels that repeat the same crap over and over, and one channel that apparently shows Law & Order 24/7?
(And don't even GET me started on this news. Yeah, because Scrubs and That 70's Show really need to be viewed in high-def.)
So I've decided to cancel my cable television starting in January, and just stick to good ol' Netflix. At $19/month, I can deal with being behind a season on the latest pop culture in exchange for no commercials and corporate raping of my bank account every month. And I can hope that they will offer these fascinating episodes sometime soon. The only things I will probably miss are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. And I will miss them hard.
Maybe I'll subscribe to the TV Guide. A wise man once said, "If you read the TV Guide, you don't need a TV."
Notice, too, that they announced this two days before Thanksgiving so no one saw the news. They used the same tactic a couple of years ago right before I quit. They will probably offer to roll back the rates when you call them. To their credit, when I returned my cable box like a year after canceling, they didn't give me any hassels.
ReplyDeleteAn even wiser man said, if you read Television Without Pity you don't even need TV Guide.
ReplyDeleteMy human says that his coworkers got their rates rolled back when they called and threatened to cancel. I'm not sure if they were in Oakland.