[TriLUG] cut the TV cable

[Scott Chilcote via TriLUG]

My wife and I decided to stop paying AT&T for under-utilized cable TV
service about two years ago.  It was like giving ourselves a raise.

We worried a lot about adapting to streaming services (and OTA) for the
first few months.  We bought a Chromecast dongle and experimented with
it.  I put an inexpensive HDTV antenna in our attic and ran the cable
through the wall to our media center.  We found that some of the shows
we like to watch are available for free on the web; for example, Comedy
Central.  So if your TV has HDMI input, you can drive it with a laptop. 
You can also watch shows from Amazon Prime that way.

That worked fine most of the time. The exceptions occur when streaming
just doesn't work very well.  We had more than enough bandwidth to
stream television, but that hasn't kept the signal from getting hitchy,
sometimes badly so.  We've had evenings when movies on Prime and shows
from the web were just too choppy to be worth the effort.  I suspect
that this is intentional throttling, and have considered using a VPN
service to get around it. 

But over time, we have found a more interesting cable cutting "process"
is underway.  We simply aren't as interested in TV as we had been for
the last twenty years.  We didn't set out to do culture wars, or prove
anything.  We have just found that there are other interesting things
that we enjoy doing.  Whether it's web browsing, tinkering with open
source, building a project at the workbench, playing computer games,
writing an article for a newsletter, going for a walk, learning to play
a musical instrument (yeah, I started that), or just reading a book. 
There's a crapton of other enjoyable things to do, once you think about it.

Just sayin', we have choices and it can be great.

    Scott C.

-- 
Scott Chilcote
scottchilcote at ncrrbiz.com
Cary, NC USA