Cut the wire

Is it possible that my son may not have the experience of channel-surfing at home? That might sound like a crazy idea, but at the very least, we’re giving it a try. After a great deal of deliberation, we’ve decided to have our cable subscription reduced to internet only. No cable TV service at all. Our television “diet” is already pretty slim – what we want to watch, we either get on DVD or we download. Evan’s got a surprisingly hefty DVD collection already, so very little channel-surfing is done on his behalf at the moment.

It’s an entirely reversible decision, of course, and the funny thing is that the customer service rep at Cox lied like a dog until I pointed out that I knew other customers of theirs who had done the same thing (and had also reported that Cox would lie through their teeth about whether or not such a tier of service existed). Such a tier of service does exist – and at $45/month, it’s still plenty profitable for them – but it doesn’t help Cox report that they have X million cable TV subscribers when they negotiate with entities like Viacom, Time Warner or the corporate entities that own local TV stations (who try to put the screws to Cox when negotiating a contract for how much they’ll be paid for the privelege of having those stations carried on the cable). Since the internet-only tier doesn’t benefit Cox much aside from a bit of income, they actively deny its existence.

And then when a nice guy like me adamantly but politely calls them on their BS, they roll out a few lame reasons why you shouldn’t go to that tier: you’ll lose your local stations! It’ll cost you to reinstate TV service! No more breaking news on CNN! And, my personal favorite: you’ll be depriving the world of income accrued by the taxes paid on cable TV service! Holy crap, I’m not doing my economic duty to the state! Off to Room 101 with me.

As long as it has an internet connection, that’s okay. The only real major misgiving I had about dropping cable TV was severe weather coverage…but even there, I’ve got a weather alert radio, and access to the National Weather Service (including warnings and radar) via the ‘net. If the power goes out, there’s plain old radio – in other words, we’re no worse off than before, other than missing out on excited live TV chatter about rotation…which still brings me back to “no worse off than before,” frankly. (Besides which, nearly every local TV station has deals in place to have their live severe weather reports rebroadcast on specific radio stations, if I really need my rotation fix.) And as for local news…well, if you’re not north of the Bobby Hopper Tunnel, you practically already have to turn to the web for that; the TV stations have collectively all but abandoned all points south because of the perception that northwest Arkansas is where the money is.

Never mind not doing my economic duty to the state – I’m not doing what everyone’s expected to do: I’m not propping up the dry, frail skeleton of the pre-broadcast information economy. I’m failing to give a crap about the DTV transition. I’m putting myself in a position to be, more or less, completely bypassed by advertising.

Enough stuff streams, or is freely available, that I don’t think we’ll succumb to the “cut off from the world” effect.

I can think of worse things to give my son than a home where being a couch potato really isn’t a frequent-flyer option.