Dropped all our extended cable more than a year ago, because we could find enough to watch on Netflix. Don’t feel too bad for Comcast though as we still use them as our ISP. Recently added Hulu+ but are not particularly happy with paying 8 bucks a month and still watching commercials.

Funny to find your article on the morning after we seriously discussed dropping our TV satellite connection! You write “cable” but satellite (only connection available in our area) is equally expensive and keeps going up, now nearing $100.00 per month and that’s without any premium channels. We are tired of browsing through hundreds of channels of which we can see only a few unless we pay for premium channels or pay per view. Also funny, but not: Most of the older movies we’ve already seen and don’t care to see again, and others we never cared to see in the first place. Same with the newer movies: The titles don’t interest us there either. They seem to be running the same movies and shows over and over too, limiting choices even more. We are part of those people who stream movies over the Internet and also rent. But we’re happy with that and some local and world news that we can find on the free networks or on the computer, and we have a strong off-air antenna too. We’re very close to ditching our satellite connection and will probably do so in the next month or so. It’s time the cable and satellite networks reviewed their pricing and the programming of their participating networks if they want to keep us as customers.

Still considering cutting cable. News is the only problem I have. Have not been able to find out about streaming Fox News. Anyone streaming Foxs News?

Being an old video guy back when it did not have a million artifacts and lousy compression schemes I think it is disturbing in a way that in an age where you would think video would be better and better in visual purity — most people are seeing the crappiest video ever! And think it is just FINE!

Streaming video is such a far cry from what, in most cases, is the original “source” recording. The internet’s packet system was never intended for video, never ever. REAL video standards pump far too many bytes of information per second for the internet.

So, we DUMB video down, and down, and down in quality, frame to frame, compress the heck out of it, remove tons of information per frame, fudge with algorithms that make speedy guesses as to how to fill in the missing blocks of video data, and then packetize it to send it through a thousand routers and get somewhat reassembled for our monitors.

But this is a false “version” of video and nobody seems to protest too much.

Even DVD’s, where you think, ahaaa, now I am going to true HD quality to match my spiffy new HD monitor those are a LIE, too!

You are NOT getting High Definition as the standard was originally imagined! Even for the sake of disc dubs to sell to the masses the original studio recording is run through processors to, again, dumb it down, remove chunks of color information and pixel definition for every single frame (25 to 30 per second depending on country standard), repackage it with fancy algorithms, and lay down the highly adulterated version onto your Blu Ray or HD DVD.

So in this supposedly advanced technology era our video quality is farther than ever from what was recorded. Not only that, but now a lot of entertainment is recorded with available moving image information already missing for sake of compression and native recording formats.

So now, to CABLE. Cable companies, to get tons of channels piped down the wire, further compress the heck out of their incoming video sources and further crap up each channel’s video output when it reaches a home.

And the satellite companies that feed a lot of cable companies are already employing their own compression hardware to further squeeze the picture as they feed it up to the satellites.

By the time the end user looks at a typical Cable channel the program they watch bears little resemblance to the video quality embedded in the original recording.

When you see “IN HD” as a banner for, say, live sports programs, you are being snookered. What the cameras are capable of outputting at the event itself is a far cry from the watered down video quality you see at home after being pumped through a ton of overlapping compression schemes.

So, the Cable companies have people turning off the switch and cutting the cable for one reason right there. People can not see much difference between the crappy picture on the cable channel and the crappy picture being streamed over an internet service.

The channels I see all over the USA and Europe from various cable and satellite connections have the same crunched qualities. The definition for the most part is so sandpapered down by compression and re-compression technologies that an actor’s face or a newscaster’s face has no pores, hardly any features, just a smooth bland NOTHING for skin!

So, there you have my little irritated lecture on this subject!

Don’t have cable. Actually don’t really get much time to watch TV.

The kids watch YouTube, my daughter likes that iCarly and some cartoons and she watches them on YouTube.

We’ve got a Netflix and Hulu account as well.

No, haven’t cut the cord to cable TV. I know there are a lot of alternatives on the internet but just don’t have the time to check them out. For now, I’m satisfied with the convenience of cable.

we cut the cord last year, wish I had done it much sooner and saved allot of $. Cable channels add a few new movies every month, and play the same ones over and over at a high price. we got Netflix for $7.99/month, and with thousands of movies, you never have to watch the same one twice, unless you want to, and you can save the good ones in your watch list. This was a no brainer, much more movies – much less money.

We also switched from our TW cable phone to magicJack, and for half a month’s cable phone fee, we have a whole year of phone service. And you can take your magicJack anywhere in the world, and as long as there is a computer connected to reasonably high speed internet your phone travels with you, instead of being limited to one location as with our old TW cable phone – another no brainer.