Cut your cable TV bill by cutting the cable
You might like commercial-free, on-demand better
By Jennifer Waters, MarketWatch
CHICAGO (MarketWatch.com)—If cash is tight, it might be time to cut the cord on cable and satellite services in favor of online options that are free or considerably cheaper.
But be prepared. It’s scary to switch and learn a new behavior.
“It is a big jump,” said Janko Roettgers, a San Francisco-based staff writer for GigaOM, an online technology information site. “It’s a completely new way of doing things and you have to figure those things out, sometimes as you go.”
Fortunately, there are resources out there to help you navigate the maze of devices and services you’ll need. Roettgers, for one, researched the alternatives for five years before writing his book, “Cut the cord: All you need to know to drop cable.”
“Cord cutting may seem daunting these days,” he said in the book. “But a few years from now, everyone is going to watch TV like a cord-cutter; without big, expensive cable bundles and with new devices that make your cable box look like a relic from days gone by.”
That might be jumping the gun a bit considering that cord-cutters represent a very small piece of the viewing population now. But cord-cutters are nibbling away at the nation’s largest cable and satellite providers, according to second-quarter results released earlier this month.
U.S. cable and satellite companies combined lost more than 670,000 customers in the quarter, according to Bernstein Research. That’s been the case for the past two years in the second quarter, the research firm said, noting that the quarter is typically one for turnovers—when students, for example, drop subscriptions ahead of a new school year.
But the continuing economic challenges also have played a key role as consumers—particularly younger and lower-income users—look for ways to cut expenses.
Industry analysts refer to the so-called “cord-cutting debate” as if it were a contentious dispute or deliberation on the pros and cons of pay-TV. It’s not.
Those for and against cord cutting carry basically the same argument: At $80-$150 each month, it’s a costly proposition to have access to hundreds of choices of programming and content—the vast majority of which you may never even see or know it’s there.
Why people do away with pay TV is a matter of debate as well. On blogs and Twitter, consumers say they cut the cord because the costs outweigh the benefits and there are easy alternatives out there. No one really watches or needs 700 channels, or even 100 channels.
To read the entire article from Jennifer Waters, MarketWatch
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cut-your-cable-tv-bill-by-cutting-the-cable-2012-08-15
1 Corinthians 9:24–25 — Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.
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