Cutting the Cord

On Saturday I cut the cord.

Not literally, as cable television no longer comes into the house via coaxial cable. It arrives from an internet modem. Nonetheless, we canceled our service and they took it away within five minutes of me hanging up the phone. The bill is to be pro-rated.

I stood by the cable guy when they laid the coax in a ditch from the curb box to the house in 1993. We had the same service provider all these years and don’t regret it. Now the missing television service will likely not be noticed.

My viewing was sporadic. I turned on CSPAN a couple of times a year and viewed maybe two or three shows on the Public Broadcasting System. We used to watch the weather during severe events, yet the local broadcast channel migrated to the internet. For that reliable service it was costing $70 per month (too much). Budgets are tight and something had to go. It’s the end of an era.

We changed our internet package as well. We had way over the amount of capacity needed for our usage. Shouldn’t the service provider be monitoring our usage to determine we have the correct offering? Maybe they should, yet that is not what they are about.

What was the downfall of cable television programming? I submit that in part it was the proliferation of specialty channels. Take T.V. shopping, for example. When it was new, I tuned into QVC Network to see what was on offer. I don’t recall ever buying anything, yet many viewers did. When we arrived at QVC’s West Chester, Pennsylvania headquarters for a sales call, we saw the quality of merchandise in the show room was questionable. With so many cable channels hawking wares, combined with my experience in Pennsylvania, the shopping channels all got lost in the noise.

When we were first married, we viewed television programs at home. In 1983 we consumed what was probably typical T.V. fare: forgettable programs like Dallas, Dynasty, Kate and Allie, The Scarecrow and Mrs. King, and The Love Boat.  The last episode of M*A*S*H aired on Feb. 28 that year. A program by Iowa City filmmaker Nicholas Meyer called The Day After aired on Nov. 20. I don’t know if this was cable, yet it doesn’t really matter. We don’t watch any television now.

Saying I left cable T.V. is a form of conspicuous non-consumption. The personal and political decision to announce this can be interpreted as a decision to abandon conversation topics with friends, or some kind of “holier than thou” internet asceticism. It can be that. All I’m trying to do is reduce our expenditures so we can survive into retirement.

While it is the end of an era, I won’t be missing cable television very much. I’m not sure what that means to the broader society. Bean counters of the internet suggest cable television subscribers are declining by about 5 percent per year over the last eight years. A lot of viewers remain. There is so much to do, so little time, and people are choosing cable television less.

Perhaps we should have cut the cord earlier. That we didn’t is evidence long-held habits are hard to break. At least, for now, there’s the internet.