Part of me would like to know how the people at Shaw Cable think. I’m sure it’s something completely foreign to me. They have probably got a long history of figuring out how to extract the most money out of people.
Today, Tammy called them and reduced our cable package from Premier TV to Personal TV (a savings of $50). First question is: how did we, who don’t watch that much TV, end up with the Premier TV package? Well, it didn’t start that way. We had basic cable (plus cable Internet) in Sooke. When we moved here, we opted for a mid-range HD package, given we had our new Panasonic plasma TV to watch it on. Then Shaw called one time, and made Tammy one of their “offers”: try the Premier TV bundle and Shaw Internet Phone for $2 a month for six months.
Click goes the ratchet.
We didn’t end up using the phone, and so disconnected it after two months and waited until the 6 months was up and returned it. But by that time, we couldn’t remember which TV channels we had before, and which ones were new. So, ignorant and fearful that we might cancel something that we watched all the time, we stuck with the Premier package. But two months of paying $90 for the TV on top of the $60 for the Internet was too much.
I paid the bill this morning and resolved to plumb the depths of the byzantine channel guide that Shaw publishes. Now that Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is finished, we didn’t need National Geographic, and the base set of channels (Personal TV) had Sportsnet ONE, which shows the UCI cycling races including the Tour de France. Really, we weren’t watching much else.
We tripped the escape, and now the bill is back down closer to where it should be: more in line with our actual TV-watching habits.
That is why we don’t have cable. We can watch all we really want to watch on Apple T.V.
I hear you. One of the confounding factors was the movie channels: there were a number of movies on the HD cable channels that weren’t on Netflix. I would spot them in the guide and then set them up to record on the PVR. Then the PVR would run out of space and they would be deleted, unwatched.