Cutting The Cord

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine, Becky, and her husband Charlie finally cut the cable tv cord.  I followed her FB posts from their research all the way to their trip to the UPS store to ship all their Uverse bear back to the  mother ship.

Along the way, I started doing my own research.  We have 5 cable boxes.  We have a bunch of house phones we never answer.  The voice mail box is full of robocall messages.  Phone, cable, and Internet are costing us right at $300!  From Becky's research, ditch all of that, buy some streaming devices on the cheap, and your Internet and entertainment costs drop to around $80.  DANG!

Becky and Charlie had specific needs, so they ended up with the Roku streaming box, and two service provides. The Hallmark Channel was at the top of her list of things she could not do without, along with every mutation of ESPN, including the SEC network!  They tried the Amazon Fire stick for a bit, but there was too much buffering to suit their tastes.

We have several older generations of the Apple TV box, so I set my course to move to streaming services available on them.  After several hours of scratching my head, I discovered that you cannot add additional services to the older Apple TV boxes.  You have to upgrade to the 4th power of Apple!  I picked up the older boxes off of Ebay.  The 4th generation box is $149!  Damn! That's per unit!  Since the spousal unit has I-phones and I-pads, it made sense to bite the bullet and order it.  The box arrived on Friday morning.  Hot digity!  Plug and play, right?????

After a thorough review of the streaming services, I picked HULU live.  Hulu has everything, including all the ESPN's, but doesn't have the Hallmark Channel.  The Philo service has Hallmark, but none of the ESPN's and mutations.  The ESPN's can be gotten on the UTUBE tv service.  The only thing not on HULU, for us, was PBS and the Weather Channel.  The Weather Channel is only available through established cable networks.  PBS is accessible through the Apple TV box.

I got the Apple TV box, to the 4th power, all hooked up.  I turn it on.  I now need an Apple ID.  What the heck???  Off to my Chromebook I go!  Apple ID in hand, now lets get to streaming!  I went to add additional services to the Apple TV box, but now, I need an I-tunes account!  What the hell????  Are you seeing the pattern?  Apple sells you a box, you have to get the new box for added features.  To get to an I-tunes account, you have to have an Apple device! (but not the Apple TV box!) .  Yep another Apple brick wall to climb over or go around!

Fortunately, the spousal unit has an I-tunes account.  Unfortunately, you cannot access I-tunes from a Chromebook.  The spousal unit's ride home that day was the longest ever!  Once she was home, and once she figured out her password, we were off and running!  Now we just have to figure out all this new technology we have brought into our household!

With the Apple TV box costing $149, I decided to add additional devices, but cheaper.  The Roku express was advertised online for $29.  I decided to buy them online, and pick them up same day once I got my email from Walleyworld saying come and get them.  All afternoon I wait.  At 6:30, bingo!  Email from Walleywold:  order has been cancelled, none of the items in stock at my store.  Walley, you are killing me....... Needless to say, I headed over to Amazon.  Same item, same price.  To be delivered this Wednesday!  The Roku express will be added to the bedroom tv.  If we like it, we will buy another to take with us on our travels.  Margarita Machine and Roku stick road ready!

I posted some of this to my FB account during the day.  My young buck friend Kevin, yells "you old people!  I haven't used cable in over 10 years!"  Then he has the audacity to further add that he just ordered two new tv's with Roku built in, AND he only will have ONE remote control to deal with.  I have young people!