Cord cut. Snip, snip.

The Breadner household has made the move away from satellite television and to Apple TV.

This move has been a long, long time coming: we're not what you'd call early adopters. Frankly, I wasn't sure it would ever come...for many years, Eva has been wedded to the convenience of one bill for all our media and telecommunications...and for just as long, there wasn't a simple option to access the shows she likes to watch.

Enter Netflix, and especially Crave TV and Shomi.

Between the three of them, plus a streaming site for my baseball and hockey needs, pretty much everything we'd care to watch is available when we want to watch it, commercial free, and...oh, hell, this is old news to you, right? You've saved yourself thousands of dollars over the years by cutting the Bell and Rogers out of your life.

We've had a great-great-grandfathered unlimited internet plan at a not-too-obscene price: we'd been told that having three  services through Bell kept that Internet deal operative. We had four: a landline, our cells, the satellite, and the internet itself. When it came time to try and trim our monthly bills, preserving that internet deal was imperative. We could cut one service out and still be fine.

Most of you would cut the landline, I imagine. In this day and age, landlines seem to be redundant...I mean, hell, you can't even text on one. I'm still leery of killing mine. Cells are far too easily lost/stolen/forgotten/shattered/depleted to zero charge...hell, my little iPhone sucks power as if it's actually a washing machine. I think we'll get to the point where I'm comfortable with just my cell (and if you told me six months ago I'd say that, I'd have cheerfully informed you that you were full of shit)...but I'm not there yet and I won't be pushed.

Oh, yeah, and is it just me, or are cell phone charger cables a new cash cow for the industry? In this house they seem to work reliably for about a month. Maybe. Then there comes a day when you plug one in and nothing happens: ch-ching, another twenty bucks down the rabbit hole. Landlines don't have that problem. Just saying.

Thanks to Apple TV, we could save almost a hundred bucks a month cutting out satellite, and that's what we chose to do.

Bell doesn't make it easy. You're on hold indefinitely (probably because they're dealing with so many other people abandoning them)...and then when you try to leave, you're told you can't, not without paying some kind of penalty.  As it turned out, either we misunderstood the three-services-gets-you-reasonable-internet thing or, more likely, they changed it. We were informed that cutting satellite would hike our internet bill by twenty bucks a month. This really pissed us off, but what can you do? It's communicated in such a way as to make you feel like you missed a few lines of fine print. For all we know, we did.

Still: saving eighty bucks a month and not missing anything. Until they start screwing with our Internet speed even more than they already do. We are severely throttled here: I have friends in Pittsburgh whose internet speed is roughly six times ours and so far as I can tell, we're paying about the same a month. It's pathetic....but it's part and parcel of being Canadian, I guess. Netflix still streams. For now. I fully expect at some point they'll throttle it to the point where you'll be forced to get their premium package in order to stream anything.

Anyway, Bell retention called us yesterday with a last-ditch effort to try to keep us in the satellite fold. They threw so many numbers and so much bafflegab at us, and they wouldn't give us a straight answer as to how much money we'd be paying them if we chose to accept any of their enticements. In the end we hung up in disgust. It sounded as if they were trying to give us the satellite for free at one point, which makes less than zero sense from their perspective. I'm sure there were untold snarls and traps in there designed to siphon ever more money out of our bank account.

I'm ready to ditch Bell entirely. Unfortunately, we can't do that until our cell phone contracts are up...and I just started one. They'll find a way to preserve their ridiculous profit margins at your expense. Trust me.

_______________

I am having trouble adapting to the new economy.

As I write this, I can look up and see what remains of my CD collection. I haven't listened to a CD in five years at least. The CD drive on my Mac mini is pooched and so is the under-cupboard CD player in the kitchen. The only other CD player I have access to is in Herbert the Pervert, our Hyundai Tucson (so named because his seats are shaped in such a way as to violate you as you climb into one). So far as I know, no CD has ever been played in Herbert.
Off behind me is our tiny DVD collection: three TV shows (Joan of Arcadia, Game of Thrones, and Saving Grace) and a handful of movies. It gets next to no use.
In front of me is my 64 GB iPod, about half full of music: mostly classical and French, with a smattering of many other genres. I'll admit to pirating some music...the stuff I can't find in the iTunes store. But usually I buy my music, dutifully sync it to my iPod...and then, more often than not, end up listening to it on YouTube anyway. I'm about to start the free three month trial of Apple Music, and in three months I suspect I'll be asking myself why I ever bothered to own music at all.
Upstairs there are at least a thousand books. They're going nowhere. I keep adding to them. And yet...sigh...give me five years and I just bet I'll have a tablet with an e-reader function...and I won't have to replace all my books because I'll just pay ten bucks a month for access.

Looking at this model from the outside, there's a lot to like about it. For the price of one or maybe two widgets a month, I can have unlimited access to all the widgets. If I was normally in the habit of purchasing anything close to one or two widgets a month, this seems like a no-brainer. But call me paranoid if you will: when you don't own the product but only access it, access can be restricted or withheld at any time for any reason. That's in all those end-user license agreements we all pretend to read. Things like this happen. And if you cross the U.S. border with certain e-readers, you'll find the content has been geo-blocked. I don't like that. At all.

I'm a cautious sort: always have been, always will be. I'm not one for headlong leaps into voids. I imagine that eventually, I will look back and scoff at myself...heaven knows it's happened many times already. I'm on record right here on this blog stating a whole bunch of absolutely insane objections to iPods. (Go back and read that one: it's entertaining.) Hell, I distinctly remember getting Internet access for the first time in 1991 and asking myself what I needed it for. Everything I want is on my computer already, why would I want access to other computers? 

Dumbass.