I Finally Cut the Cord

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After decades of being reliant on cable television providers and 15 years as a Cablevision/Optimum/Altice cable television customer, I finally cut the cord. I turned in my Altice cable boxes, put in my own modem using Altice’s internet service (the only local broadband provider), and expanded my viewing to an array of streaming services. It was not an easy choice, and I’ve been working towards it for close to two years.

When Watching TV was Easy

I’m not old enough to remember the very beginning of television — my memories start in the early 1960s watching a black and white 20″ Zenith portable TV with a Space Command remote control (the clicker! — If you sneezed just right, you could change the channel). Living in New York City, we had more available stations than most areas of the country, still, in comparison to today, the lineup was very limited. Equipped with a weekly TV Guide or a local newspaper TV page, you could plan your watching for the week — since there were no recording devices, it was either watch the show when it was on or hope for a rerun sometime in the future. Ah, those were the days!

Little by little TV became complicated. First came UHF (Ultra-High Frequency) stations, then the addition of cable and satellite networks, Netflix, digital broadcasting, and most recently, internet-based streaming services. Choices now abound but the complexity and potential costs have increased as well. So, why did I cut the cord? Simply because my property has too many trees to allow for satellite, I want to access all the new content, and our local cable company (Altice) just doesn’t get it.

Cable Companies May be Missing an Opportunity

Recently, Altice USA CEO Dexter Goel said, in a CNN interview, that he envisions a day when cable TV no longer exists. He believes the economics are not there, that cable customers require too much service, and that your smart television will serve as the content aggregator. I can’t be certain about the first point though personally, I was comfortable paying a bit more for convenience, good technology, and superior service. The second point about customer service is a problem of Altice’s own making — their technology was awful, and it required a lot of well-paid technicians to visit your house, and often advise you to stop using their boxes. As for the smart TV becoming the hub, unless Apple decides to get into the TV business and/or licenses Apple TV to third parties (both of which are very unlikely), there should always be a market for a set-top box. Altice is chickening out!

I’d prefer to acquire all my video content through one provider, with a single on-screen guide, unlimited recordings, reasonable pricing, and accessible customer service. Instead, now I’m faced with a variety of streaming providers, no single integrated guide, streaming apps that work differently, duplicate aggregator platforms, not much customer service, and a constant battle trying to remember what I watched where and when — though Apple TV and YouTube TV help with that. All in all, I’m not really complaining — so far I’m happy with life without Altice cable, especially since I found a provider, Locast.org, for the individual local stations I lost. Plus, it’s great that there is such a boom in new content from all the streaming services. I just yearn for when companies and consumers will once again value convenience.

Isn’t Life Supposed to Get Easier (as we age)?

When I started my first job in the information technology industry after college, the focus of most of our projects was to make it easier to do one’s job. Customers more often than not would thank you for making them more productive and simplifying their work. Then, at some point that I haven’t identified yet, technology took a turn towards the dark side. A mixture of competition, deregulation, and decreasing hardware costs created a technology boom that put computer chips everywhere, often before the all-important software was ready.

First, came the move to mobile phones that were much more than phones. Radio became complicated with satellite radio, HD radio, and streaming radio battling OTA (over the air) stations. Cars became complicated with some manufacturers putting more emphasis on entertainment than on the driving experience. I won’t even try to discuss the travel or financial industries, and now with the pandemic, even education and performing arts and culture have jumped on the technology bullet train. The bottom line is that you have to have a computer engineering degree to deal with the activities of daily living.

Symbolically, having cut the cord with my cable provider means I’ve eliminated the last vestige of a simpler life and moved “all in” to digital life. Perhaps now that all this infrastructure is in place, we as a society can again focus on simplicity and convenience. Imagine having your personal avatar in a virtual environment able to control all of the aspects of your life just by, for example, pushing a button to select a preset radio station or sneezing to change a TV channel. It sounds like heaven! Tell me about your cord-cutting experiences or where you’d like to see more focus on convenience in the comments below.

I’m not putting any advertising on this blog or my other blog, Caring For a Spouse. I hope that if you appreciate my efforts, you’ll buy me a coffee through my ko-fi account. Simple and safe, any small contribution helps me offset the cost of hosting, etc. And it’s all virtual so we’re automatically social distancing!