Turning Off the Satellite

For years we have had satellite service for television.  But as the prices kept creeping up, we were finding less and less that we able to watch.  We do not spend a whole lot of time watching TV, but when we do, it must be family friendly.  And quite honestly there is not very much left on television that is.  We would watch sports, Nick Jr or Disney Junior in the mornings, and INSP in the evenings.  Then there was the commercials.  I am shocked at the commercials that they allow on television!  My "last straw" commercial was the Luvs commercial with the breastfeeding mom on NickJr one morning.  As much as an advocate of breastfeeding I am, that commercial was an awful representation of what "real life" breastfeeding moms are like, and my children saw more of that women's breast during that commercial than they have seen of mine in the 11+ years that I have been breastfeeding.  It was after that commercial that I was really convinced that we needed to shut the TV off.

We had to wait until our contract was up, and then I called and turned it off.  That was an interesting experience as they tried to convince me to remain a customer and in the few weeks since it has been turned off I have received several phone calls to reconnect, but I have declined each time.

We do still watch TV.  We have Netflix that we stream to our Play Station 3.  The children have several shows on there that they like to watch.  I signed up for a free trial of Amazon Prime which includes Amazon Instant Streaming, but I do not think we are keeping that.  Besides the older NickJr shows, there really isn't anything included in it that we want to watch that we don't already get on Netflix.  We have discussed getting a Roku box because our BlueRay player upstairs streams really slow, but we haven't made a definite decision on that. The hardest part of streaming for us is our slow internet.  Nobody can be using the internet while someone is streaming.  It is the only internet we have available though, so we just have to deal with it.

To watch NFL football, we bough the Game Rewind.  We can watch all the games 24 hours after they are over, with no commercials.  Not as good as watching them as they are happening, but it works.

We have many shows and movies on DVD and BlueRay.  We also get Redbox movies at least once or twice a month.  We are glad that we decided to have our satellite turned off.  There are so many options today that allow you to choose what you want to watch without having to watch commercials that are much more affordable than satellite TV.