*scottstuff*

Turning off the TV, 2005-style

Posted by Scott Laird Thu, 30 Dec 2004 01:44:42 GMT

I finally called today to disconnect our Dish Network service. It only took 15 minutes on hold to get through to them, which wasn’t quite as bad as I’d feared. Still, the process raised the age-old question again: does hiding the “cancel my service” option really keep people from canceling?

This seems to be a phase that everyone with small kids goes through–“we’re going to stop watching so much TV and just turn the darned thing off.” My parents tried it once or twice, as have friends, siblings, and in-laws. Inevitably, people seem to turn it back on after a year or so, but they never seem to really regret it.

Watching less random TV is good, but mostly we’re trying to avoid paying $50/month when all we really watch are movies and things that are available on broadcast TV. So, the plan is to pick up a PCI HDTV tuner and use it to grab just the handful of shows that we care to see. I already have MythTV running at home, so adding a HD card to the existing setup shouldn’t be that hard (heh–everything with MythTV is harder then you’d expect), and I expect that watching HD resized to fit an 800x600 projector will look vastly better then the SD Satellite→Analog→TiVo→Analog→Projector video that we’re used to now.

Anyway, we’ll see. We’re sitting on at least 2 months worth of DVDs that we’ve never seen, plus a ton of subtitled anime, and I’d like to have more time to read, anyways.