My Cord Cutting Journey Part 1
By One and Zeros
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Editor's Note: I've asked a friend of mine to write up his cord cutting experience. He has gone through it more recently and embraced it more deeply than I have. I hope that you enjoy his journey as much as I have.
- Schmoid
]
A Brief History
I can track my love of all things tech to two very distinct moments in my life. The first occurred shortly after my high school graduation in 1982. My father gifted me an Audio Receiver and speakers. The setup was straightforward and the quality of sound was, to an 18 year old, superlative. But it was the first time the thought popped into my head that the experience might be better with a larger, and yes, more expensive pair of speakers. I grabbed every audiophile magazine I could find from the newsstand and spent months obsessing over that perfect pair of speakers. I was hooked, and that started my audiophile compulsion. The computer side of my tech love affair didn’t manifest itself until 1992 when I met my future ex-wife. It was yet another gift from my father: a 486SX computer with 4 MB’s of RAM. I knew very little about computers and the gift was meant to stimulate my interest so I could be better prepared for the business world. Mission accomplished. And like my audiophile lifestyle, this new passion came with the desire to constantly upgrade.
Thankfully, life on this earth doesn’t limit you to one or two passions. Great TV and Movies is just plain American. An estimated 116 million households with a TV can’t be wrong. I love Science Fiction. I know that’s a big surprise. Star Trek is King, followed ever so closely by Star Wars. Then there is sports on ESPN, cooking shows from Food Network, police procedurals like Bosch, more sci-fi, fantasy, YouTube, Judge Judy (well, maybe not Judge Judy). All of it is just magical. Great Audio, TV, movies and PC equipment has shaped my personality and continues to contribute to my chosen profession: 20 years of employment and a love affair as a marketing manager in the tech sector.
That was then
But life is rarely static and things happen. Things like divorce. One day you’re living in a 2,500 square foot house with a 2 car garage with a wife and children. Then you wake up one day and it feels like it was just a dream. Now you have a dinky one bedroom apartment where everything feels like it was made out of lesser materials. And your carryover belongings you got to keep just feel somehow out of place. Very gut wrenching. But there was one silver lining. There was one ray of sunshine that cut through the dark moods. My tech setup stayed 100% intact. All of my toys remained with me to rearrange like a child’s building blocks. I discovered rather quickly that you can put your PC, your TV and your audiophile equipment in the same living space. Downsizing my lifestyle had one huge benefit. My aforementioned obsessions could be kicked into overdrive.
A solution in search of a problem
Armed with 30+ years of tech obsession, numerous upgrade cycles and now a bachelor lifestyle, I was ready to tackle what tech nerds do best: search for a solution where no real problem exists. Oh, we are famous for this. It is the primary justification for owning all of this techy stuff. And the problem I identified was, “How Can I get my favorite TV shows and Movies on my Computer and then out to my TV?” The whole cable TV market has bugged me for a long time. They offer a million channels when you only really end up watching a dozen or so. It is like shopping at a supermarket for the essentials for tonight’s dinner and having the checkout clerk tell you need a hammer and nails to make pasta. In embarking on this minor problem of paying for channels I would never need, I made some fabulous discoveries.
The solution for me was to cut the proverbial cable chord. Stop living with what the cable MSO’s were forcing on me, and start finding the content I love over the Internet. But how can you ensure that Monday Night Football, Dancing with the Stars and Dark Matter (watch this on SyFy!!!) continue to dance across my retinas uninterrupted? How can I find the video content I love without a dedicated coaxial cable and a set top box? There are so many options, what should I choose?
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