Turn Off That TV!

Mark Indelicato of Ugly Betty (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

When I was a kid and first heard about the concept of "pay TV" I pictured a little coin slot on the top our our black and white TV set, sitting right in front of the rabbit ears. My little sister and I also thought that there was a pair of hands inside the automatic dishwasher, scrubbing away. How could we have known otherwise? It was early days for technology.

Somehow, over the years, pay TV has insinuated itself into our lives, with monthly costs increasing to the point where the cable bill has become something to be reckoned with, indeed! I scarcely ever watch live TV, and somehow found myself paying hundreds of dollars each year for just the few Red Sox baseball games shown in our viewing area.

In solidarity with my blogging friends, Pat (Sorry Charter or No Cable for You) in Massachusetts, and Pam (Time to Go Back to the Antenna TV for Us) in Georgia, and in the interest of making life simpler and cheaper, I am going to try life without cable TV.

My first move was to check to see that I would still be able to find episodes of The Office, Lost and Ugly Betty online. No problem--I can continue to watch whole seasons at a time via Netflix, and I can catch the latest seasons on TV Duck or Hulu or on the network channel websites themselves.

Next--the Red Sox. No matter how I tried to convince the customer representative in India for my cable company that I am NOT in the local viewing area for Boston, most of the Red Sox games on the New England Sports Network were blacked out for my part of New Mexico. I think I'm going to switch over to listening to the games on the radio. Here is a site with links to Red Sox radio stations. I suspect that I could also get the audio for the games on the Red Sox website, but it so cluttered with stuff and ads for pay video that I don't have the patience to wade through it all.

While doing this research, I found out more about radio on the internet. To be continued...