The Sun Is Setting On The Cable Companies What always goes up, gets you angry, and is hard to get off of? The answer to this riddle hit home the other day when I got my new cable bill. The bill just seems to keep going up. Now I know there is a slight amount of inflation but let me tell you about my cable bill. I had called the cable company a couple of days ago and asked them if there were any promotions I could take advantage of. The agent said I will look over your account and see what’s available. She did so and said she could save me $12 a month. It wasn’t much but I thanked her. You know what they say every little bit helps. It was only a couple of days later I received my August cable bill which had an increase of $56 after the $12 she took off. That was an increase in my bill of about 23%. I don’t know why I got so angry when I read the bill, because I usually don’t let things like this bother me and if I have to do something about them, I do. But to me this was a whole other ballgame, and was as if the cable company wanted me to make up the revenue they were probably losing to the Internet or even to other cable companies which had special deals. There are quite a few people who take advantage of these cable deals and switch their service every year or two. I decided I was no longer going to take this lying down. I called the cable company and told them if they didn’t put the bill back to what it was originally every month, I was going to reduce my services way down and eventually find a new supplier. They told me there was nothing they could do so I immediately dropped down to their core service keeping the basic television channels and the Internet. By the way the Internet has gotten very expensive and they are now charging one hundred nine dollars just for that service. The agent when questioned had said to me the reason my bill went up so much, was I had a lot of promotional discounts on it that expired. I said there is no way I will ever pay over $300 a month just to have cable. There is something about that that just aggravates me. One of my sons was saying this would cause me to lose the premium movie channels. My reply was simple, there hasn’t been much on them lately to miss. I have Netflix and Amazon prime on my Roku device which is hooked up to my television. I also have a cable phone which is dedicated to my fax machine and my website. The charges are $35 a month but I get a promotional discount of $15 which will expire soon no doubt. I dealt with this by doing some research on the Internet to see if there were any free phone services. I used to use one of them named MagicJack many years ago, but since then I see the services greatly improved with many brands being available. After some research I settled on the Ooma Telo. You have to buy the device but the calls in the United States are all free but you also have to pay a small fee and tax and in my case that comes to $5.50 monthly which is a heck of a lot better than $35. Everything I read about the service was complementary and I managed to get the device at a discount on Amazon for $69. This cost will be made up in just a few months. The next thing I decided was to look for streaming service on Roku which could replace some of the things I like the most which I was losing, particularly hockey games. I settled on a streaming service, which has a lot of the features of the cable service and is called Fubu. It allows you to record everything in a similar way you would with cable. It has a few movie channels but no HBO, Cinemax, or Showtime. It has all the shows I look at on the History Channel. I had thought about switching my cable service to another carrier and taking advantage of the promotion, but I felt the aggravation wasn’t worth it since they would travel down the same road eventually, I didn’t need the hassle of having to deliver equipment back to the carrier every year or two. The Fubu service goes for $65 per month which is about the same as the core cable service without the sports and some of the channels which were included with Fubu. I had looked at several of the services which were also streaming services but the one I got was the most highly recommended site for people interested in sports and the reason for this was you could get every type of sport and record every game. That alone would be enough for some people. There are also some free streaming services which you can add that have some interesting things on them such as Pluto TV which brags it has 250+ channels and thousands of movies all at no cost. I added this to my Roku box, what the heck it doesn’t cost anything. What doesn’t make sense to me is adding the premium movie channels on an individual basis. That gets a little pricey after a while as I said in the beginning of the article, the content for movies leaves a lot to be desired. What bothers me about some of these free sites is the fact they take movies and put breaks in them for commercials. Ordinarily I might be able to live with that, but not in this case because some of them not only play the same commercials over and over on each break but sometimes have only one commercial which is played over and over in the break and all the following breaks. I also notice when there is a set up like this, I have had problems in the past because after several commercial breaks the connection would fail and I couldn’t see the rest of the movie. I can’t help but believe the sun has set on the cable companies because they just can’t keep raising prices this way and eventually many other people will get disgusted like I did and seek alternatives to their cable companies, and believe me there are plenty of them out there.
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