Cable TV "Bondage"

I would like to eliminate our "bondage" to the cable companies . . including satelite TV companies, and Dish Network. What I want to see, is a company that lets us select stations from a menu, and only pay a small fee per station selected. Out of a current list of 2 or 3 hundred channels . . . I can easily pick 10 or 12 that I actually watch, including 1 HBO. Having to pay so much, and in effect subsidize unpopular or lesser used stations, pisses me off!

Your thoughts?

I've always felt this way. But so far, all my yelling and foot stamping has done nothing.


Now I just use the magicks of the internets.

Hulu makes my life happy right now. I'm sure it is headed for suck, but at least it is interesting now.

You are 100% right. I watch on a regular basis less than a dozen channels but still get to pay for a few hundred.

TWC sucks!

I had cable. I went back to rabbit ears. I do not miss cable.

I have dishtv and to get all the channels I wanted it would have been ridiculous. I don't need 500 channels, i just want my local news and ALL of the History/Science/Bio/ Discovery channels. One cartoon channel and Comedy Central too.

And me and my b/f were just talking about this the other day. We want to go without the dish when the contract is up and go with the hooking internet up to the tv route.

Time Warner is the devil. They constantly raise rates and you have to call and harass them to get them lowered back down. The FCC tried to pressure cable companies to offer "a la carte" cable a few years ago, but they claimed it would be too expensive for the consumer, since the cable audience would fragment and therefore force down advertising rates, which would then force the surviving networks to raise the fees they charge cable companies.
I have your the basic 70-something-channel cable, and after my rates kept going up monthly, I got fed up and cancelled it back down to the $12-a-month basic service. Well, Time Warner screwed up; they send me a bill for the $12-a-month service, but they never turned off all those other channels. So I've been enjoying screwing them out of about $45 a month, for the past three years.
If that ride ever ends, I'll just use the internet to get the shows I want. Since you can watch pretty much any TV show for free online now, I think the time for a la carte cable has come and gone.

Sadista mentioned advertising costs . . . . when cable TV first came out in the 70s . . it was sold to us on the premise that, since everyone would pay for the TV channels, there wouldn't be any commercials, except for local stations! Well, that lasted a number of months . . . and one by one, here came the commercials . . . so today, you can't tell the difference, except for the premium movie channels.

When you ad the amounts you pay, for TV, internet, and telephones, its enough to make you , bundled or otherwise.

I just canceled the home phone, and put the two cell phones on a plan, that costs the same as the previous separate plans, but doesn't charge minutes for anyone with the same company, and we have 10 "silver bullets" for any phone numbers we call on a regular basis. Above all that, we get 1,400 minutes per month, with rollover of unused minutes. So I'm reasonably happy with the phones.

That leaves the TV and Internet!

The main reason I have cable tv is because it was a "deal" bundled with internet, which I was going to get anyway.
In my previous place, we had cable but were not exactly paying for it.