On Television Part 2 - Cutting The Cord

Those of you who have read THE FIFTH COLUMN: On Television may wonder if the Fifth Columnist has finally decided to cut the cord as it made a pretty good argument for that.

Well we have finally overcome over 40 years of inertia and made the decision and as of the end of the month we will no longer have a cable television service.

Our original plan was simply to replace it with streaming services and some downloads but decided for one time costs only to also add an antenna based over-the-air (OTA) television service.

There was potential for a significant number of channels if we went with a sophisticated rooftop antenna system.

 

However we decided we did not want to deal with a rooftop install and rotor systems and cabling and decided on a simpler indoor antenna that gives us local CBC and CTV and Global and TV Ontario (and sometimes the local french CBC station). This provides us with easy access to local news. As well most of the American broadcast channel programming we watch is on CTV or Global so we will still get that. What we are losing are some programs from cable only channels, though some of these are also available on streaming services like Crave TV.

We added an inexpensive (certainly compared to the purchase price of the equivalent Rogers device) OTA PVR without subscription fees so that we can record programs and watch them when we want them without commercials.

On the streaming front we stayed with the old standard and reliable Netflix, as well as Crave + HBO/Movies, adding Starz, providing a lot of high quality programming.

We also continued the CBC Gem Premium package as a good portion of what we watch is CBC programming and this provides all of that plus more, with no commercials. It also provides live access to all local CBC stations in Canada as well as the CBC News Network.

The newest addition that we did not have before cord cutting is BritBox, a relatively unknown service in Canada that provides programming from the BBC and ITV. If you are not familiar with it you should check it out as a provides a remarkable range of high quality programming.

And if this is not enough we can supplement it with a few free sources of programming.

By cutting the cord we cut our TV budget almost in half while still contributing to the cost of providing programming but providing less subsidy to the middleman cable company.