Why I don't subscribe to cable TV

Briefly, in two sentences: Firstly, the amount of programming I am forced to pay for as a cable subscriber is ludicrous compared to the amount of programming I actually watch. Secondly, I have the internet, which trumps the paid service due to nearly on-demand programming and the relatively low cost.

On the first point, when I cancelled my cable subscription, they asked me why and what they could do to improve. I stated simply that I don't watch about 98% of what I feel I'm paying for and that if they were to offer some kind of á la carte model I would be more likely to subscribe. I want to feel I'm paying a fair price for the amount of content I actually watch rather than have to pay for a constant flow of shit through which I must manually sift to filter out those tiny peanuts of televised gold. Besides, half of this content being streamed to my house 24 hours a day is nothing but commercials and infomercials, and I won't shed a tear doing without them.

On the second point, the internet is a wonderful thing. I mean look, the very same company which formerly provided this service is allowing me to post criticism of their TV service via their internet service. Plus, my favorite TV shows are delivered to me in a fashion even better than the relatively limited DVR option. I use a sweet little gem of a program called TVShows which automatically searches for new episodes of the shows I want to see and downloads them via a BitTorrent client of my choice. So I get home from work and bam, there are my shows waiting on my hard drive to be watched at my leisure, on my own schedule. And, unlike DVR, I can easily expand my hard drive space such that I never have to delete any recorded material if I don't want to.

But there remains a slight advantage to DVR and cable TV as it stands today, which is the fact that I don't have to watch them on a computer screen. But that is a small price to pay compared to the savings of not paying for the over-bloated TV service, and besides, I can easily purchase an adapter and run the shows to my TV if I really wanted to that badly, which I will probably do in the near future.

So, until the cable TV subscription model changes, I will be watching TV via the internet. If you feel the same, I kindly suggest canceling your cable service. If enough people do that, the cable providers will be forced to evolve. Or, they can just sue all their former customers like the RIAA has been doing. Either way, they can't have it this way forever.