Aside: Adventures in Cord Cutting

Every summer my wife and I suspend our cable service because we don’t watch any TV.  Up north we have daylight until 10:30pm during the summer and we would just rather be outside.  In the fall, we would reactive our account.  We found that the past couple of years, we had cable mostly so I could watch live sports.  That was a pretty expensive proposition.  With both of us walking the picket line this past fall, we decided to cancel the cable and see if we missed it.  It turns out that two and a half months into the TV season, we rarely miss the 1000 channels that we never watched.  If and when we want to watch something, it will be available elsewhere a la carte.  We have found that we don’t watch enough TV to even make Netflix worthwhile!

This of course left the question of how to watch my sports.  For this year, I have forsaken NFL football and it hurts.  It hurts so damn bad!  But, with the late start of school, I have been at work most Sundays and the rest of the weekend is spent doing all of the things that didn’t get done during the week.  I could not bring myself to give up NHL hockey.  So, I purchased NHL Game Center.  Game Center is a streaming service. I can watch games on my TV through the Xbox, on my PC or on my tablet.  So far, I am pleased with the service.  There are some quirky things that happen, like cutting out commercials and intermission shows on some feeds, so you only have a screen saver to watch.  However, on the whole, the stream is good and when it’s not, it’s usually from my end.  The best part is that the price is only a fraction of what we were paying for cable.  I’m currently in negotiations with my better half to have some of the savings transferred to the hobby fund.  Fingers crossed.