by Kevin Burton
Imagine you went to the grocery store and instead of selecting the vegetables you wanted, you had to sign up for a “vegetable package.”
So, you can’t get fresh green beans unless you also take artichoke, leeks and rutabaga. “Hey that’s the package, that’s how we sell it, take it or leave it,” they tell you.
That’s cable television. And my wife had had enough.
Once, or maybe twice over the years, we selected a lower-cost “tier” from our local cable provider to save money. But then the prices would go up until they were almost as high as they were in the first place. Of course, with no additional channels or improvement to service.
I won’t mention the provider of such poor service, Cox Communications, so as not to embarrass them.
We had cable so long because Jeannette needed consistently-reliable internet service while she was working from home. Now she is retired. We of course still want reliable internet, but it’s no longer affecting anyone’s job.
Probably 70 percent of the channels we had on cable were junk TV that we would never, ever watch. In fact, we watch so little TV, that it almost made sense to just say forget it.
And if it weren’t for NFL Sundays, we might have done so.
Jeannette and I love our Sundays together in the land of football. She will sometimes sleep through parts of games. But when she is awake, she roots hard for Kansas City and Dallas.
She is perhaps even more entertained by my new fantasy-football-colored NFL viewing habits, my screaming in delight or exasperation based on what individual players are doing, instead of teams.
One successful field goal for example, from Dallas uber-kicker Brandon Aubrey can get me not just five fantasy points, but five multiplied by as many shares of Aubrey that I have. Last year it was five shares, this year, four shares, so far.
We were slightly annoyed last year to have workers from two providers of fiberoptic internet and cable services digging in our back yard, ringing our doorbell each time they needed access to do it. But a few weeks ago we selected one of those companies, and as they say in the commercials, we “cut the cord.”
But it hasn’t been as easy as “snip, snip.” And our NFL Sundays are in some jeopardy as a result.
What we have is Roku TV. Downstairs in the mancave we have a conventional TV with a Roku stick attached to the back. Upstairs in the living room we have a Roku TV. We have just one Roku account, but I am not clear that the channels we can get upstairs are the same ones we can get downstairs.
More importantly, local TV stations are not included with Roku. Local CBS, Fox and NBC (and ABC for Monday night) are the means by which we get NFL games.
So we bought small antennas for each TV and that was supposed to fix that. Well, the antennas don’t bring in the local Fox station. We live south of Wichita at the edge of the county and the Fox tower is way up north. So we had to buy Fox One for $20 per month. We’ll cancel it when the season is over.
The NBC station seems to be coming in OK on both TVs.
In the latest version of “Kev’s timing,” just now there is some kind of crisis by which the towers of both the CBS and ABC stations have been severely damaged. The CBS Station, KWCH, was knocked off the air completely for a time. We can’t get them right now either because of that, or our unfamiliarity with Roku.
We already had Amazon TV for Thursday night games. We’re drawing the line at Netflix I believe. They have four NFL games including two on Christmas Day. We’ll be getting those via radio.
The most difficult thing about getting the NFL on TV used to be locating the clicker. Now we’ve got to go through multiple gyrations, which we haven’t mastered yet.
“It’s somewhat uncomfortable because you’re used to just being able to turn it on,” Jeannette said. “It’s a learning curve, but for the cost involved we’re still going to come out ahead.”
Yesterday I talked about having a new computer AND a new Microsoft operating system. With the new TV setup thrown in, it’s about all this old man can take.
I doubt our NFL-watching experience will be the same, for at least the first few weeks of the season.
It’s also possible I could just watch most games on the radio. Maybe then I could simultaneously clean out the garage or wrestle down the mess in the mancave. The fantasy points for my teams will ring up on the website whether I watch the games or not.
But now with Roku we for sure have a way to watch “Beat Bobby Flay” and our other favorite shows from Food Network. So my personal fight with technology goes on, with some rounds lost, and some rounds won.
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