The Long And The Short Of It

When I moved here from the mainland, I didn’t ship a TV. I bought one and initially used the VCR I shipped along with a tremendous number of VCR tapes.

The last people in the house had cable TV and internet, but I only wanted internet at the time. When I hooked up the router to the cable, I also tried connecting the cable to the TV antenna connection on the TV and scanned for channels. I was surprised to find 20 or more channels. Because of the filtering they used on the cable, these were general low tier channels and many were noisy of dropped out. Still, there was enough to watch if I cared to.

The cable company is in the process of changing over to all digital, so these channels are disappearing.

I have multiple Roku devices and a TV with Roku built in. My viewing consists of a combination of free streaming channels and Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime.

My house is around the way from where I could pick up broadcast channels from Maui, so streaming it is.

Many decades ago I had a big satellite dish and had many channels for very little money. You could subscribe to ‘packages’ of channels, however you also could just pick and choose Ala-carte. For less than $400 a year I had HBO, Showtime, The Movie Channel, WTBS, WGN, the weather channel and so on totaling perhaps 30 channels. My signal came from the same satellites that the networks used, unlike Dish and others that take these same signals and redirect them back up to another satellite and back to viewers. You have no idea how clear the original signals were before people like Dish and the cable companies get hold of them and compress the signals.

So in any event, I recently lost a bunch of channels, but I’ll get by. 13 years of no cable TV bill was a great run.