Last Fall when we moved into our new house, our cable provider offered us a free upgrade for four months. The free upgrade gave us essentially every channel package except for some of the movie channels — hardly an issue, as between Netflix, Redbox and other sources, I have more than a lifetime’s worth of movies at my disposal.
The catch to this free gift is that the packages aren’t automatically cancelled at the end of the trial period. And for four months we watched them all, or as many of them as we could. We watched the Game Show Network, the NBA channel, the BBC channel, and so many more.
Then the trial period ended and our cable bill jumped to $180. That doesn’t included Internet, either — $180 a month for cable television. Just as cancelling channels is the opposite of adding channels, the process of cancelling channels was the opposite of adding them as well. Gone were the friendly voices that were there to add the channels; in fact, after 5pm, you can’t cancel anything at all. And before 5pm, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be on hold until after 5pm.
After much persistence (and some begging on their part) the packages were removed. Bye bye, Game Show Network! Bye bye, MTV South America! Bye bye, Telemundo in HD!
So sad; now we are down to 400 channels, and somehow our Caller ID channel (yes, we had a Caller ID channel) got lost in the process as well.
Our DirecTV bill was around 170 and we had every movie channel. To bring it down I cancelled all of them except HBO and Showtime. That was last March. Bill went down to 130. Now a little over a year later, because of a million “small” rate increases and new nickel and dime fees here and there, the bill is back up to 170 WITHOUT those channels.
Also, I wanted to switch channels around. Showtime is a useless channel to me whenever Weeds or Dexter is off. I wanted to cancel it when they aren’t on and get Cinemax or Starz instead then cancel those and get Showtime back when the shows come on. But while you can add channels on DirecTV’s website, they don’t allow you to get rid of channels on the website. The thought of calling them and trying to talk to them made me not do it and just keep Showtime.
it’s too bad TV is not as simple as when you grew up. There was channels 4,5,9,13 then latter it added 25 and 34……….FREE
I am surprised as an icon of up to the minute computer gadgets Guru such as yourself you even have cable. In England when i moved you had a choice of 5 channels. cable was begining to come out, somthing I never got to experience mainly due to as my dad would put it ” what do we want with that cable rubbish? its all ads and repeats! 49 stations? people must have more money than sense”
Needless to say I have never had cable here and at those prices i dont think id even consider it.