Why I hate cable

For the eleventy-ninth time this week, I shut down my TV because I couldn't find anything on worth watching. Not unusual, I suppose, but it really irks me that I'm actually paying Comcast for the signal, and all I get on it is garbage!

That brings me to another point - why do I have to pay for a signal that is principally commercials? Scanning through the 100+ channels this AM, I only found about 3 that weren't constantly broadcasting commercials, and all of those were somebody's evangelistic religious programming. Honestly, I could do better just taking the DTV broadcast signal! At least it's free. I'd only have 20 or so channels to skim through, before I decided it was all garbage, and the FCC puts some limits on how much of the air time can be dedicated to commercials.

What good are 150+ channels, if 100 of them are infomercials, and the other 50 or so are TV evangelists asking for your money? It seems that even the broadcast stations carried by cable give you no more than 10 minutes of real programming and at least 50 minutes of commercial advertisement per hour, and to get anything else, you have to pay for "premium" channels!

I am of the opinion that I already pay for a premium service, and it is not being delivered. The cable companies are taking money from ordinary people and content providers, and the content providers are taking money from advertisers, and both are delivering little more than advertising and solicitations to the basic cable subscriber. If I had my way, they would all be prosecuted for fraud - in Georgia, it's called "theft by deception".

I originally signed up for cable service because it was the only way I could get broadband internet connectivity. Since that time, mobile broadband has become available at a competitive price, eliminating the need to plug into Comcast for internet. I canceled my cable internet service last spring, leaving only the television service active.

Currently I only actually use one cable TV channel on any regular basis - the Weatherscan channel - and since I can get equivalent information from the official source - the National Weather Service - via internet, I can't honestly say that it's worth the money I pay for cable. My Honey likes some of the stuff that airs on the Food Network channel, but as far as I can tell, the amount of new programming they broadcast is pretty minimal. Most of it is re-broadcasts of previously-successful shows that are already available on DVD! I told her we should take the monthly cable fee and use it to by the DVD sets. Then she could see the Food Network re-runs on her own schedule.

The same thing could be said of the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel, the Travel Channel, the History Channel, and any number of the other cable-only channels. Have you ever noticed that those channels also have a huge amount of commercial advertising in their air time? Or that when they return from a commercial, they always recap at least the last 5-10 minutes of the program that aired before they went to the commercial? It's a pretty sneaky way to sneak in a higher commercial-to-programming ratio, if you ask me! If you buy the DVD and compare it to the equivalent broadcast, the difference becomes obvious - a program that required an hour of broadcast time, sometimes takes less than 25 minutes to view to completion! That means that for every hour of broadcast, you sometimes get a half-hour or more of commercials! Since commercials pay the content provider for developing and distributing the programming, it seems to me that the content provider should be, and may actually be paying the cable company to distribute its products, it doesn't seem fair that the cable subscriber should have to pay the cable company to receive those commercials!

So now you know why I hate cable, and why, as soon as I get off my lazy duff and do something about it, my household will cease to subscribe.

Mariner.