Thoughts on cutting the cable and all this new technology

[chrisinhouston]

My wife and I are thinking about cutting our cable connection for TV, we currently get out HS internet and cable via the coax line but we find we seldom watch anything from the cable side of the TV. We travel a lot normally and even when we are in town about the only time we turn on any cable TV is if the grand kids are visiting and want to watch something like cartoons. Mostly we watch DVDs we own or rent, we usually watch a movie while eating dinner or afterwards, we have a TV in our bedroom that has not been switched on in over a year, one in a guest room. I have one in my office and that's it. I used to like the Food Network but that was when they actually had chefs and not housewives or stupid elimination shows. I loved the Japanese Iron Chef but hate the USA one. Plus they seem to mostly show endless reruns.

We need to go talk to our cable company folks and see if there is any savings, there often isn't much as they sometimes give you a better deal with a bundle of things. We pay around $85 per month, our cable is a smaller one and the only player in our area so we can't shop around and they did a good job of upgrading the HS internet. We seldom have any problems, the speeds are fast and they will even go up in the attic and fix wiring issues at no extra charge.

Yesterday I got a new BR DVD player as our old LG one died. Its a new Sony and I was surprised to see how many streaming features it has, lots of movies, TV type shows, pod casts, music, etc. I really like it but I discovered that it is incompatible with my older home theater sound system as the newer machines use HDMI and some kind of Coaxial audio link. Well, we had known this was an issue for awhile, the big LG flat screen also will not run sound to the system so we were planning on upgrading. It mainly worked with watching movies or listening to music. I have an HD tuner and SiriusXM for most of my music. At the time I bought my tuner back in 1997 it was state of the art, Nakimichi and it cost me a small fortune.

Last night I ordered a new tuner/theater sound system. I settled on a model by Onkyo and after reading some complaints about service and the one year warranty got an additional 2 year extended warranty. Amazon had it all for $385 with free shipping and I added the funky new coaxial audio cable.

Now comes the dilemma about streaming and bandwidth. Our cable company is planning to implement a teared policy by years end. Something like 250GB and then a tier for 350GB. I have no idea how much that equates to if you stream some movies, upload and download email and attachments, etc. I don't want it to end up like those old roaming charges that used to happen on your sell phone if you went to another town or state.

Oh, and I got a Google Chromecast just for fun. It was only $35 and I got a 3 month free Netflix code to use to get movies. It duplicates some of the other things I have but who cares, it is kind of a cool little device.

Too much technology maybe.