About a year and a half ago, the hubby and I made the decision to cancel our cable service, an option many young people are taking these days more commonly known as “cutting the cord.”
Our reasons were varied. First, there was the financial reason, motivated by wanting to live a more Mustachian lifestyle. Secondly, it was because we were pretty tired of AT&T UVerse trying to screw us over…we had come to anticipate them flat out lying to us every time we called them about our ever-rising monthly bill, and finally it just got to be too much. Third, I mean…what did we have to lose? It wasn’t like the cable companies wouldn’t be clammoring to sign us back up if we decided we didn’t like it.
So, we cut the cord, and replaced it with an over the air (OTA) antenna, combined with our streaming services, which were certainly enough to give us a steady backlog of content we wanted to watch. And in fact, other than a handful of live events (football games, the Oscars, etc.) we primarily relied on the streaming services for entertainment.
But last month, all of that changed: a friend of ours let us know that TiVo was once again offering their OTA Tivo Roamio device with lifetime service included. Having already been a fan of TiVo from the time before DVRs were standard with cable service, I was very easy to convince, and I instantly loved our ability to record things like the Olympics and our favorite network shows (and especially CBS shows, which aren’t published to any streaming services others than their own paid channel.)
However, what I wasn’t expecting? The wealth of amazing shows TiVo would start recording from PBS.
As I sit here typing this today, having had the TiVo less than a month, I’ve got nearly 40 shows in my “recommended queue”, all of which have already been culled for what I actually would want to watch or not. (Don’t blame me for the Tosh.0…those are the hubby’s!) I would say probably more than 90% of the shows are from PBS.
There are great cooking shows (my current favorite is Essential Pepin), interesting documentaries (really loved “Independent Lens: In Football We Trust”), more travel shows than I can count (Journeys through Japan is excellent), and home-improvement + gardening shows a-plenty.
In short? I <3 PBS. Their great content (across 4 channels) has probably meant that my reliance on streaming channels has gone from 90% of our watch time to less than 30%.
I should probably also state – neither TiVo nor PBS paid me for this endorsement. I’m just a fan. Hooray public broadcasting. And if you love it too, ya know, they rely on donations so represent. We certainly will be donating as well.
So if you’re considering cutting the cord – I say go for it. And I’d also say don’t forget to check out what your local OTA PBS stations may have to offer.
