greyHats

So, last summer we cancelled cable. We had gone three months with watching a total of 3 hours of entertainment. With our television costing ~$100/month, that was $100/hr for those three hours. That didn’t add up for me, so we started The Grand Experiment. That experiment being a media-centered couple, removing the few hundred odd channels of 24/7 media from our lives. The idea was, with that extra $100/mo replace it with purchasing digital copies of our media and streaming them to the television, in addition to purchasing dvds of shows.

This went well for the first couple of months. The downside was that not all of our shows were in digital format we could (legally) watch on our tv. So we thought hey, download the media, then we’ll make sure to buy the dvds when they are released. This sounded like a good idea, however in practice we didn’t realize the toll it would take on us.

First of all, we were required to use less-than-desirable means to procure said content (ie. Bit-torrent, Usenet). The issue was, we started worrying about plotting ourselves on the MPAA road-map of litigation. So we started using applications such as Peerguardian, to cover our tracks. The lowdown of all of this was that it really took a toll on us, on top of that we worried about our “vote” being counted, and then there was the X factor of channels like Discovery, National Geographic, Etc. that had very interesting programs unavailable outside of the cable/dish networks.

SO, the experiment is over, I picked up our cable-boxes again and we’re back to regularness. It was very weird to get rid of cable, and now it’s weird to pick it up again. I feel sort of bad that we failed. I don’t like cable companies, and I think that their fees are high. But, I don’t really see any other alternatives. leh sigh.

note: I would have switched to directv, dish, fios, etc. however my apartment doesn’t see the south sky, and verizon hasn’t offered fios at my complex.