Just Do It!

 

I finally did it. I cut the cable. My wife and I have been talking about this for at least a year and spent a lot of time deciding on which streaming service best fit our needs. Even before Covid, our main form of entertainment has been television. While we love going to Raymond James to watch the Bucs or to Tropicana Field to watch the Rays, we really love having to only walk steps to the kitchen or the bathroom...not to mention binge-watching our favorite TV series.

As we were going through the cord cutting process, we marveled at how many streaming stations we all have access to these days.  And since I’m an ‘old fart’ it brought to mind the fact that when I was a kid, in Sarasota we had a total of three stations to choose from…and NO remote control!! These three channels were accessed with the good old rabbit ear antenna (sometimes with tin foil attached) which sat on top of the big square box TV. I can visualize it now, rabbit ears spread wide in a horizontal position, aluminum foil wings on the ends of each antenna while below, Ralph Kramden was threatening to send Alice to the moon. And then came a huge technological marvel...the outdoor antenna that could be rotated by a control inside the house! And the picture was black and white…I remember watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon on our little black and white TV. 

Here’s a little history of TV broadcasting. The first American TV station began broadcasting on July 2, 1928, but it wasn’t until 1953 that WSUN went on the air in St. Petersburg (and went dark in 1970), followed by WTVT in Tampa and WFLA, which went on the air in 1955 and are still broadcasting locally as an NBC and FOX affiliate respectively. In my one and only bid for stardom, I as den chief, with the help of my parents, took my little cub scout group up to St. Pete to be on the Captain Mac Kids show on channel 38. It was really so corny looking back, but very exciting at the time.

Back to the cable. In the early 1960’s, George Storer ventured into the cable television business in the early 1960’s and Storer Communications became the first cable I remember in Sarasota. This of course added lots more stations and…we had a ‘clicker’ remote control! Storer Communications continued to operate as a cable television company until the assets were split between Comcast and TCI in the mid 1990s. So we went to Comcast for many years, then Verizon which sold out to Frontier. TV’s became bigger and flatter and high definition has made watching football an awesome experience.

So…we did it! We cancelled Frontier (other than the highspeed router) and now and not only is our cable bill less than half of what it had been, we have more channels than ever with the various apps we chose. It has taken a little getting used to, but we are totally happy with our decision. This is yet another instance that everything these days is internet driven and thing will continue to evolve. It’s been an interesting ride from rabbit ears and clickers to speaking into my remote control to find pretty much anything we want to watch! It will be interesting to see where it all goes in the future.