Disconnecting

The other day we made the decision to cancel cable TV. I'm the only one who watches it, and only one or two channels then. I record shows from overseas to watch at my leisure (hah!), but they're always changing the schedule without personally warning me and I've come to think that it's not worth the monthly fee, especially when there is so much available online for free.

Then we realised that cancelling cable TV would mean cancelling all TV, since our cable TV box also acts as a digital antennae for the regular channels. Unless we buy a separate antennae, we can't receive any channels at all. Actually this isn't really a big deal for us. Nobody watches those channels here anyway. H doesn't really watch TV at all and the boys only watch DVDs from the UK. Plus, it means we don't have to pay the NHK fees (like a British TV licence) anymore! So, the plug has been pulled.

It's not quite as extreme as it may sound though. The boys still have their DVDs, and we've taken out a subscription with Hulu. It's a website that provides access to a variety of TV shows and films, but we discovered that, with our recent model TV, we can watch it all directly on the television set. There isn't quite the range of programmes that I would have liked but it'll still take me a while to get through what they've got, and at a fraction of the price of cable.

Having a choice of things to watch has even tempted H into watching TV with me. His first picks? The very first episode of Colombo, and a famous Japanese murder-mystery film Inugami-ke no Ichi-zoku, both from the 1970s. I wonder what that says about us...