TV Cost
TV Cost was Originally Posted on April 12, 2012 by lavarock
According to a news item on Reuters, by the year 2020, your pay-TV bill will be $200 a month by then. I have to wonder why people are not looking for cheaper alternatives.
Decades ago I decided to get a “big dish” satellite dish. I was able to watch many free channels and also purchase channels individually or in a package. One package I found covered a number of movie channels I wanted, and then I filled in ala-carte with other channels. My bill was about $350 a year. It covered 176 channels. Note that these were real TV channels and not radio channels with slides showing music facts. I has HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, The Movie Channel, TBS, CNN, WGN, and so on and so on. having east and west coast feeds was great because if I missed part of a movie, I could watch the west coast feed 3 hours later.
Over the decades the prices would go up, but the ability to buy only the channels I wanted was great. In fact, many of the “base cable channels” were on the same satellite so I could set the dish up and watch 24 channels with no effort. Granted, if a channel I wanted to watch was on a different “bird” it could take a minute or two to have the dish rotate to that satellite.
Another plus was that many of the channels has discrete audio channels. On some channels (like a ball game) it was possible tonull out the announcers audio and just listen to crowd noise.
I also was able to watch many TV series and shows before they were released by the TV stations. For example, Star Trek episodes came down days before the network would show them.
Some people would find this unnerving and overly complicated, yet I saved money over cable, had a lot better selection and did not have to take channels that others offered me I did not want.
I also had to continually try to explain to a coworker how my TV signal was better than the DishTV signal he had. He kept saying that his signal was DIGITAL and mine was analog and his was better. What he didn’t want to understand is that I was receiving the same signal, from the same satellite that DishTV was looking at. My signal went directly to my TV. Their signal then was received, converted to digital, uploaded to their own satellite, received back on earth again by the consumer and sent to their TV.
A big problem with their system was that there were two transversals from earth to sky to earth agai. Digital signals also have artifacts as items move quickly on teh screen or a heavy thunderstorm passes.
Both satellite systems are prone to the twice yearly solar outages when the dish points towards the satellite and the sun (a giant noise source) moves directly behind the satellite.
Having a big satellite dish here in Hawaii is not as easy as a smaller DishTV/DirecTV type. I would have to protect it from the wind an that is not very easy.
As readers here know, I bought a Roku device to allow me to watch many channels through the internet. I subscribed to Amazon’s Prime for $79 a year which allows me to watch streaming shows. No, neither Amazon nor the many free services on Roku are supplying local channels. However, there is still plenty more to watch and I am saving money until something else comes along.
As for paying $200 A MONTH for stuff to watch. Hey, it’s just TV!