Category: tivo

no more cable TV

After plenty of dithering back & forth (see here and here), I finally went ahead and canceled my cable TV service today. And returned my cable card to Optimum, so there’s no going back now.

My TiVo still works, without the cable card, so I can at least finish watching the backlog of stuff I have on there. But eventually, I’ll have to cancel the TiVo service (which renews in October), wipe the TiVo, and recycle it. (Or find somebody to buy it, which seems unlikely.)

Canceling cable was a bit of a pain, but not as bad as I’d thought it would be. The phone call took about 15 minutes. The rep made one attempt to get me to stick with the service, by offering me $25 off for three months. If she’d made it $25 off for a whole year, I might would have accepted that and canceled YouTube TV instead. But I don’t really want to just kick the can down the road by three months.

Returning the cable card was pretty easy too. It turns out that Optimum now has a store quite close to me, in a strip mall on the Somerville Circle.  There was no one else in the store when I got there, so I got in and out pretty quick. There was a half-hearted attempt to get me to upgrade my internet connection while I was there, but I said I was fine, and they said OK.

(And then I stopped at Steck’s and got a corned beef Reuben to take home for lunch. I hadn’t been to Steck’s in a long time, but they’re in the same strip mall, and it’s almost St. Patrick’s Day, so it seemed appropriate.)

So, that’s that. I’m not 100% satisfied with YouTube TV, but it’s good enough for now. I think I’ve decided to stick with YTTV for three months, at least, since it’s $10 off for the first three months. After that, I’ll decide if I’m sticking with it, switching to Hulu + Live TV, or giving up on “regular” TV altogether.

thinking about cord-cutting again

Back in 2021, I dropped my regular cable subscription down to their “broadcast basic” package. At the time, it was $25/month, I think. It went up to $35 at some point. And now, it’s gone up to $50. Which seems like a lot to pay for mostly just regular over-the-air channels. (I’m too far from both NYC and Philly to pick up OTA channels with an antenna, so if I want them, I need to get them from cable TV or streaming.)

The price increase, and an occasional desire to watch ESPN, has gotten me interested in maybe shutting down cable entirely, and switching to YouTube TV or Hulu + Live TV.

I’m also paying $150/year for TiVo service, which comes out to $12.50/month, so my total cost is $62.50/month. YouTube TV costs $73/month, so I’d be only be paying $10.50/month extra, and getting both my local channels, and a bunch of cable channels. And I could ditch my TiVo and stop having to switch HDMI inputs on my TV every time I want to switch from watching broadcast TV to streaming and vice versa. I could just do everything from my Apple TV.

And if I switch to the Hulu + Live TV bundle with Disney+ and ESPN+, I can actually save a couple of bucks. I’m currently paying $19/month for my legacy Disney bundle, so cable + TiVo + the Disney bundle is $81.50. Ditching those three and switching to the Hulu bundle would cost $77/month. So that’s probably my best bet. (I’d lose the ad-free Disney+ that way, but I could live with ads on Disney+, I guess.)

On the other hand, maybe the new streaming service from Fox/Disney/Warner would be a good compromise. It looks like that would get me my local ABC and Fox stations, plus ESPN and some other random channels. No clue what it’ll cost though.

The prices on all of the streaming services are getting too high, really. Maybe I should rethink the whole thing and spend more time reading books and comics.

NYCC, football, booster shots, and other stuff

It’s Sunday morning, and I’ve got a bunch of assorted thoughts kicking around in my head, so I’m going to try to write a rambling blog post, and see what shakes out.

NYCC

NYCC is next weekend. I’m not going this year. And I’m not even enthusiastic about watching any panels from home, really. I looked at the schedule of what would be streaming via Popverse, and there’s not much that looks interesting to me. I’m pretty sure that NYCC 2021 was the last time I went into NYC for anything. (Leaving out the time in 2022 when I passed through on my way to Albany.)

It’s also occurred to me that I haven’t really taken a vacation this year, and we’re getting near the end of the year. I’ve used up a fair bit of my PTO time this year on sick days, but I could still take a few days. I should probably do that. I don’t need to have a plan to do anything specific, but it would probably be good for my mental health to check out from work for a bit and go for some long walks or something.

TV and TiVo

I see from my “On This Day” widget that I bought my TiVo eight years ago. I keep thinking about finally getting rid of it and pulling the plug on cable TV entirely, but I’m still hanging on to it. I only get the basic broadcast channels through cable now, but that’s still useful for stuff, including football, news, and a handful of shows.

Meanwhile, I talked myself into signing up for NFL+ yesterday, mostly because it was 50% off, and because I kinda wanted to watch the Jaguars/Bills game from London this morning at 9:30, and it’s only on NFL Network. So now I’ve got subscriptions to both MLB.TV and NFL+. At some point, I’m going to have to cull some of these subscriptions. I’ve got Netflix, Peacock, Paramount+, and the Disney+ bundle, plus Apple TV+ from my Apple One bundle, and Amazon Prime Video.

The Giants are doing pretty bad this year, by the way, and I usually lose interest in football if the Giants aren’t doing well, but I still haven’t given up hope this year just yet.

COVID and flu shots

I got my COVID booster and flu shot yesterday, COVID in the left arm and flu in the right. My right arm is fine today, but the left arm hurts a lot. It was bad enough overnight that I couldn’t put any weight on it, so every time I rolled left, I got a stab of pain. That made for a rough night.

I’ve noticed that all of the “ceremony” around COVID shots is basically gone now. The person who gave me the shots didn’t ask for my vaccination card or ask me to sit around CVS for 15 minutes afterward. And the old CDC V-safe program was shut down earlier this year, so I won’t get all of those fun text messages this time. So I guess we’re in the phase now where we’ll just be getting a yearly flu shot and COVID shot together every year, and it’ll be no big deal. Oh well.

Social media

Like most sane people, I’ve almost entirely given up on Twitter now. I’m mostly using Mastodon and Threads. I’d hoped that most of the people I followed on Twitter would move over to Mastodon, but that didn’t happen. A bunch of the tech folks moved to Mastodon, but most non-tech folks (and news orgs) have moved to Threads instead. That’s not great, since Threads doesn’t have any third-party clients, and will probably eventually have ads and a bunch of other dumb cruft, but it’s good enough for now, I guess.

Right now, I’m listening to Sleepy Hollow on XPN, and Julian Booker, who used to post the playlist to Twitter, is posting it to Threads. So it’s that kinda stuff that’s probably going to wind up on something like Threads rather than Mastodon, and I guess I need to deal with that.

In theory, Threads is eventually going to support ActivityPub, so there will probably be a way to consolidate my Mastodon and Threads browsing into a single third-party client at some point. (Assuming Meta isn’t pulling a Lucy/football thing and lying to us about ActivityPub support…)

Speaking of Lucy/football stuff, here are a couple of fun takes on that from today’s Foxtrot and an older Off The Mark. And, while I’m posting comic strip links, I liked today’s Cul De Sac too!

Time Marches On

So it’s Sunday morning again, and I’m futzing around on my laptop, aimlessly, as is my wont.

I thought I should mention Twitterrific again, as it now seems to be 100% officially dead. So I guess I should remove it from my iPhone and iPad and give up on Twitter completely now. I’d been holding out some hope that Elon would reverse course and turn the API access back on, but I guess not. Sigh.

I was also looking around at the “on this day” links on the sidebar of my blog, and noticed this one, originally linking to the website that my brother Pat and his wife Heather set up. Heather gave up the domain name for that, heatherandpatrick.com, a long time ago, after Patrick passed away. But, just for yuks, I decided to see what, if anything was at that domain now. Turns out that another Heather and Patrick are using it as a website for their upcoming wedding! That’s kind of nice. (Certainly better than the domain squatters who had been sitting on it every other time I’ve gotten curious about it over the years.) Anyway, they seem like a lovely couple, and I hope they have a great wedding!

On a completely different subject, I just got a notification that TiVo is turning off their suggestions feature. Kind of sad to see this going away, though I hadn’t used it much since I dropped back to the Broadcast Basic cable plan. This news got me curious about what alternative are out there to watch broadcast TV, rather than cable + TiVo, for me. First, it looks like I would still have no luck with an antenna. AntennaWeb still indicates that I’d need a major-league outdoor antenna to pick up anything from here. So that’s out. And some of the streaming services like Hulu + Live TV include the major broadcast networks, but that costs $70/month, which is way more than Broadcast Basic is costing me. So I guess I’m sticking with minimal cable + TiVo for now, even though TiVo seems to be in a slow death spiral, and my cable provider’s support for CableCARD is probably dicey at this point.

The Giants lost to the Eagles last night, so my interest in football for this year is mostly done, though I might watch the rest of the playoffs and the SuperBowl anyway. I really got interested in football this season, and that was kind of a surprise to me, since I’ve been losing interest gradually for quite some time now. I guess it was mostly the Giants doing well that kept me interested? Maybe also that, this season, football seemed to be just about football. There was almost no talk about politics or racism or COVID or brain injuries or anything. I realize that all those things are still going on, but I could watch a football game and pretend that it wasn’t for a few hours? Or at least not think about any of it? It was a nice escape. (And yes, the Damar Hamlin thing was a sudden jolt of reality, but he seems to be doing reasonably well, so that’s good.)

Speaking of escapism, I started watching Star Trek: Discovery season 4 yesterday. I signed up for Paramount+ a little more than six months ago, largely so I could watch all the new Star Trek shows, and I still haven’t watched a lot of it. I’ve mostly just been using Paramount+ to watch Inside the NFL lately. I need to catch up on both Discovery and Picard. Maybe now that the Giants are out of the playoffs, I can catch up on all my sci-fi TV.

Old Media

I went down a rabbit hole over the weekend, and I thought it might be fun to write up some notes on it. I had decided that I wanted to watch Magnificent Butcher, a Sammo Hung movie from 1979. I have it on DVD, so I pulled it out of my random DVD pile and stuck it in my Xbox.

The Xbox appeared to boot up, but I couldn’t get anything to show on the screen, and I couldn’t eject the DVD. Long story short, I eventually got the DVD out and the XBox working, but it was stuck in 640×480 resolution. I eventually got it back to normal 4K resolution, but that’s another long story.

So back to the Sammo Hung DVD: I decided that this might be a good excuse to experiment once again with DVD ripping, and watching ripped DVDs on my Apple TV. I have HandBrake installed on my PC, with libdvdcss, but I haven’t used it in a long time. Well, it still works, and I ripped the DVD with no problems.

Next issue: how to watch it on the Apple TV. First, I decided to hook up an external USB drive to my new router. My old router supported an external USB drive too, but I tried it once and found it to be slow and unreliable. So I thought I’d give the new one a try and see if it was better. Well, it was. I hooked up an old 500 GB SSD, formatted as NTFS. The router recognized it, no problem. It automatically exposed it via Samba. I had no trouble accesssing it from my Mac or PC. And it’s pretty fast! So I copied the .mp4 file for the movie up to it, along with a few other random .mp4 files I had on my PC.

Next, I had to decide how to access that shared drive from the Apple TV. I already had VLC installed on the device, so I tried that. It connected to the Samba share, no problem, and let me watch the movie. So I guess I have a pretty good way of watching random .mp4 files on my Apple TV now.

So maybe I should go buy Ladyhawke from Rifftrax and watch that! I’ve been tempted to buy videos from Rifftrax before, but I’ve always held off, since I didn’t have a simple way to watch them on my TV.

I also remembered that I’d copied a few Akira Kurosawa movies from my TiVo to my MacBook several years ago (2016, apparently), via cTiVo. I gave one of those a try, and it works with VLC on the Apple TV too, so now I can copy those files over to the drive and watch them from Apple TV.

And that got me curious about whether or not cTiVo would work on my current MacBook. Well, it does. It was updated earlier this year, and should keep working for a while longer, though I guess it’s on its last legs.

So now I’m copying a few more Kurosawa movies up to my Mac, and I’ll copy those over to the drive tomorrow, so I can have a little Kurasawa marathon at some point in the future. (Of course, there’s no reason I can’t watch the ones that are still on the TiVo, on the TiVo, but…)

I also took an old scratched DVD that wouldn’t play on my Xbox and ripped it on my PC. It didn’t give me any errors, though that doesn’t guarantee that the .mp4 is perfect. I’ll try watching that soon, I think. (The movie is Syriana, and I’ve had the DVD for years, and just never got around to replacing it. So now I can finally watch it! Probably!)

As an alternative to VLC, I’ve considered Infuse, which is probably better, or at least prettier. And of course there’s Plex, which I’ve tried before, and was just too much of a hassle.

Looking at the Plex web site right now, they seem to be de-emphasizing their original purpose as a way to stream your own media, and are now touting the ability to watch free live TV via their app. Most of what they have seems like the same kind of stuff you can get via Pluto, so I’m not sure why anyone would be too excited about it. But OK.

So, anyway, I now seem to have a relatively hassle-free way to watch .mp4 files on my Apple TV. I don’t think I’m going to go on a bender, ripping a bunch of my old DVDs, but I may take some of the more questionable ones and rip those. (Maybe some more old Kung Fu movies that might be a little scratched up.)

almost cord-cutting

I’ve been thinking about canceling my cable TV service for quite a while now. But I can never quite talk myself into it. I finally managed to at least convince myself to drop back from the “Optimum Value” package to the “Broadcast Basic” package, and I called and took care of that today. The math on my cable bill is complicated, but the change should save me somewhere between $50 and $70 per month.

Broadcast Basic is the tier that just gets you broadcast channels, plus News 12. And at this point, that’s about 90% of my cable TV viewing. I’ll also watch stuff on TCM, BBCA, and SyFy occasionally, but not that often. Not enough to justify $50 or $70 every month.

I was pleasantly surprised that Optimum didn’t make me work too hard to do this. They didn’t try to get me to keep the old package, or put me on hold, or disconnect me or anything. All told, it took about 15 minutes.

For streaming video, I’m now paying for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney+, and Apple TV+. So there’s plenty to watch there. Of course, I’m also tempted to sign up for Paramount+, for the Star Trek stuff, and HBO Max, for the DC stuff, but I’m not too tempted.

The boiling frog

I’ve been thinking about the boiling frog metaphor a lot lately, both with regards to small things and big things. This blog post is going to be about some (relatively) small things. (And also, a bit, about the sunk cost fallacy.)

My cable bill this month had a notice of a rate increase, starting next month. It’s a pretty big increase, both on my TV service and my internet service. But there’s also a note that says that existing customers won’t see their rate increase by more than $14.50. The wording on this was a bit hard to parse. It said “rate” and not “bill” so it wasn’t clear if it meant that no individual charge would go up by more than $14.50, or if the total increase wouldn’t be more than $14.50. I called to ask about it, and of course it’s the former. So it should be two $14.50 increases, plus a handful of fee increases, mostly in the $1 to $2 range. So my overall bill should go up by maybe $35. If they’d actually done the full rate increase all at once, my bill would be going up by more than $60, and that would likely have moved me to (finally) drop my cable TV subscription. But the $35 increase isn’t necessarily going to push me to do anything rash. Every time I think about dropping cable, I remember that I’ve got a TiVo which would become useless if I drop cable. But I bought that back in 2015, so I’ve certainly got my money’s worth out of it, and I shouldn’t worry about that particular sunk cost.

There’s some talk about the new rates on the DSLReports forums. Nobody’s happy about it, but for folks like me that only have one option for internet and TV, there’s not much you can do about it. I have no other option for internet, so I just have to pay whatever they charge and live with it. And I don’t think I’m ready to drop cable TV entirely, but I’m considering dropping back to Optimum’s “Broadcast Basic” package which is $25/month and just gets you the broadcast channels and a few others.

I did briefly consider dropping cable entirely and recycling the TiVo, but I still can’t talk myself into it. And, heck, I should really stop watching television entirely, since it’s probably going to give me Alzheimer’s. (I may be oversimplifying those study results. Still, it’s probably not good for me.)

Relating to boiling the frog, but not to anything else above: Boil the Frog is a neat service that generates a Spotify playlist linking any two artists together, in a (nearly) seamless way. I tried some random artists and got some interesting lists. The one linking Jimi Hendrix to Boards of Canada is nice.

Cable TV shenanigans

About a month ago, I blogged about how my cable TV provider was discontinuing my old plan and moving me to a new one. That’s happened, so I now have BBC America, Disney XD, and a few other channels that I’ll probably never watch. For the first year of the new plan, it should have been slightly cheaper than my old plan, so I was OK with that.

For a while now, Cablevision has been tacking on a “surcharge” of $6 per month for “sports and broadcast TV.” This is basically just a way for them to raise prices without saying that they’re raising prices. Well, this month, they announced that they’re splitting the surcharge into two separate surcharges, a $5 sports surcharge, and a $4 broadcast TV surcharge. As silly as the original surcharge was, splitting it into two separate charges is even sillier. And, while it’s not a huge price increase, it does wipe out the price difference between my old plan and the new plan, so I’m now paying about $1 more per month than I was previously.

Ever since Altice bought Cablevision, I’ve been wondering what kind of changes they’d make. It looks like they’re taking the path of eliminating legacy plans and bumping up prices a bit, while taking some steps to avoid losing customers (like the promotional pricing they gave me for the first year). So, I’d say they’re still better than most of the other cable companies out there, but that’s not saying much. Cable TV prices keep rising at a rate higher than inflation, and I don’t think that situation is going to get any better, as the industry continues to consolidate into a few very large companies.

This is all pushing me even further towards cord-cutting, though I’ve decided that I won’t do that until at least a year from now, when my second year of TiVo service is up, and my promotional pricing from the cable company expires. The NY Times recently published an interesting guide to cord-cutting, with advice based on your viewing habits.

On the cable TV side of things, I think that cord-cutting will, at some point, exert enough pressure to keep prices in check. Even without that pressure, TV service isn’t a necessity, so there’s that. I’m worried about the internet service side of this thing though. High-speed internet service is becoming more of a necessity, especially for people like me. The tendency for prices to go up while service quality goes down, when one company has a monopoly in a given area, is well-documented. For now, I’m quite grateful that I live in an area where Cablevision/Altice has to compete with Verizon, so there’s at least some incentive for both companies to provide good service at a not-too-ridiculous price.

Cable TV

A few days after blogging about how I was likely to keep paying for TiVo and cable TV, I got a letter in the mail from my cable company. I’ve been on an old, discontinued, plan for years. They’re finally dropping that plan and forcing me to change to a new one. To start off, they’re giving me a slightly better plan at a slightly lower cost, with Starz thrown in for free, so that’s good. But after a year, that offer ends, and I’d presumably have to start paying the regular price for that plan, and I’d lose Starz. So I’m not sure what I’ll do a year from now. Next October may be finally time to drop cable entirely.

In the meantime, though, my new plan includes BBC America and Disney XD, which weren’t on my old plan. This means that I can watch stuff like Doctor Who, Dirk Gently, and Orphan Black on BBCA. And I can catch Star Wars Rebels and maybe the new Milo Murphy’s Law (with Weird Al!) on Disney XD. So that’s pretty cool.

TiVo Bolt, second year

Evernote just reminded me that my free year of TiVo service is just about up, so I need to decide if I want to pay $150 for a second year, or trade in my TiVo Bolt for something else.

I bought the Bolt about a year ago. The first year’s service was free. After that, it’s $150 per year. That seems a little steep, considering it’s mostly just paying for the TV guide service. After a year with the Bolt, though, I don’t think I’d ever want to go back to the cable company DVR. It’s just so much better.

I might also consider ditching the Bolt in favor of the Bolt+, which is a pretty nice upgrade, but totally unnecessary for me. It’s got a larger hard drive, but I’ve never run out of room on the Bolt’s drive. And it’s got six tuners instead of four, but I’ve never needed to use more than two or three tuners at a time.

I’m not particularly worried about TiVo getting bought out by Rovi. That happened almost six months ago, and there have been no issues with the service since then. It looks to me like that went smoothly and TiVo is continuing to function as always. So I’ll stick with the Bolt and let them charge me $150 for a second year.

I’ve also thought about ditching cable TV entirely, of course, but there’s still enough interesting on to make it worthwhile. I am, though, thinking about dropping Netflix. They raised prices last year for new members, but held the price down for existing members for a year. I just got the notice that my year is up, and my price will go up to $10 per month. With the new TV season starting up, I probably don’t need Netflix right now anyway, though I was looking forward to Luke Cage. There is also some other good stuff coming to Netflix this month, but I don’t think I really need it. I heard someone on a podcast mention recently that they subscribe to Netflix only during the summer months, and cancel it in the fall. That might not be a bad plan. Cancel Netflix, then resubscribe when Agents of SHIELD, The Flash, and Supergirl go into reruns. (Speaking of which, I need to remember to check my TiVo OnePass for Supergirl and see if it’s still valid, since the show has switched networks!)