Your opinion on cable TV

[mangar]

In my country, cable TV costs a relative fortune, and except one or two channels, with constant reruns, there's absolutely nothing to see there (I'm talking about channel 8, and bbc prime, for those from the relevant country..),
How is it in your own country? do you find cable TV worth you money?

EDIT:
added satellite TV

[arsenic23]

If I could get a subscription to just the History Channel, I'd be set. But as it is I don't even have standard cable. It's SO much cheeaper to just buy box sets of shows I may want to watch then to subscribe to all those channels I'll never even look at.

[mips]

We have sattelite tv here and I dont think it is worth it. Just junk with the exception of a few channels like BBC Prime, Discovery, National Geographic, History Channel, Hallmark channel.

Edit: Another thing that gets my goat is the bad picture quality. The level of mpeg2 compression is way to hight. Terrestial analog broadcasts have better picture quality and this can easily be seen when swithcing on the tv to see the same channel via digital sattelite and anolog arial.

[teet]

I pay $24.95 /mo for the first year to get 71 channels of cable (it would be like $59.99 regularly). I live alone and really don't have much time to watch TV during the school year. It's nice to have when I do feel like watching it, but I wouldn't pay $59.99 /mo to watch an average of 30 minutes of shows a day.

I like watching TLC, Discovery, A&E (I like house flipping shows), a couple shows on MTV, and The Office on NBC.

-teet

[DoktorSeven]

They should just let you subscribe to the channels you want for a low price (if you want a few). Discovery, Comedy Central, and The History Channel would be more than enough for me.

[sebbouckaert]

Some say my country was one of the first EU countries to develop a commercial working cable TV network in the early seventies. Since Belgium is relatively small we've always had public stations from neighboring countries on our cable. On top of our own local stations this includes public channels from Holland, France, Germany as well as BBC 1 and 2. The fact that most foreign programs and movies here are subtitled instead of dubbed has always given the TV watching Belgians the advantage of picking up a word or two in different foreign languages.

On the other hand things have changed since my childhood seventies: cable networks are now pushing their customers to subscribe to digital cable TV, thus slowly reducing the offer of analog channels. For example: we now have only 1 French channel left and there's rumours that very soon BBC1 and 2 will disapear too, leaving us with BBC prime for digital pay subscribers.

On top of that, since the early nineties we saw the rise (here and everywhere else I presume) of commercial TV: bringing us daily happiness of the same predictable formats and ads like in the rest of the world (Big Brother, Idols...)

So, 999 channels of ad-bloated pulp TV (like I was told as a kid only to exist in the US) has now become very common in the EU.

We pay about 25 € for a year's subscription of analog cable. I don't watch a lot but on areal reception we have barely 2 public stations and almost no effort in good broadcast is being made here since 99,9 % has cable. So I think we keep our subscription until we will be forced to go digital. Then it would be nice to have pay-per-channel, but it will probably be more pulp at a higher cost.

[mgmiller]

Where I live, on Long Island, NY USA, cable is pretty awesome in turns of content. The company is called Cablevision. We have about 8 or 10 regular broadcast channels in my area that you can pick up for free with an antenna. With cable, you get those plus a lot of assorted other standard definition channels, plus various movie channel packages like HBO or Showtime if you want to pay for them. Optional HBO or showtime, etc. on demand and the option for a digital PVR in standard or high def for only about $5 or $10/month extra.

In addition, we are now up to 40 high definition channels. There is no extra charge for the high def stuff, they just keep adding it. 3 Months ago there were only about 10 high def channels. Watching Planet Earth in high def is like looking out a window! The total line up is over 180 channels.

Even the standard definition channels look good for the most part. The same company supplies my broadband internet connection. The standard hook up is 15 megabit down and 2 megabit up. For an extra US$15/month you can get it upped to 30 megabit down by 5 megabit up. I have this in my office.

Both the TV and internet are very reliable, outages are rare. I also have a VOIP phone line through the same service, US$34.95.month for unlimited calling anywhere in continental US/Canada/Puerto Rico. No extra taxes or anything, that is the actual, total cost.

Because I use all 3 services, they discount my phone bill to US$14.95/month, again, no extra taxes, that's the total cost of my phone line.

So what is my actual bill?
Interactive Optimum Television is $86.30 (I have HBO and other optional packages and services)
Optimum Online Internet is $44.95
Optimum Voice Telephone is $14.95

Total is $146.20/month

On the whole, I'm pretty happy with the hookup.

Our cable company uses a fiber optic backbone with the last few hundred feet of run to the house on high bandwidth coaxial cable.

The Verizon phone company is now starting to try to switch people over to their FIOS service in some of the surrounding towns. This is a fiber optic to the house service that is the first real competition our local cable company has ever had. As their presence is increasing, my cable company keeps giving more services and higher online speeds for the same cost. This is the first real competition they have had in our area and I love watching the market forces at work. Competition is good for the consumer.

[ynnhoj]

i haven't had cable television in a long time, and don't intend to have it hooked up again any time soon. i'm on a tight budget, and it's really not worth what it costs. in a perfect world, i'd be able to subscribe to only the few channels that i would regularly like to watch (tsn, the cbc, and sportsnet). fortunately, i still get the cbc without having cable.

the worst thing about having cable was the amount of time i wasted in front of the television -- i used to get glued to the tv, even if there wasn't anything good on. i'd rather find better things to do with my time.

[Paul820]

I got rid of sky ages ago, it was repeats all the time. When one channel got to the end of the run they used to start it again from the beginning on another channel. All there is on sky is the stuff that used to be on the main channels which i paid my license to watch in the first place, sky just bought them all. Now sky are charging to watch them again!!!! I stick to watching DVD's now, tv has gone right down hill for me.

[ceelo]

A bit overrated. I went without it for the past year or so and didn't feel like I was missing much. Got it back just recently though (along with a very nice 15mbps connection ) and I still watch a lot of local stuff.