TV Trouble and the Cable Cave

Back in June, I posted about the TV in the front room dying (after 15years of service) ... we moved the big plasma from our bedroom to the front room, and got a nice new television. It hadn't even been six months and that nice new tv developed LINES all through one side. I guess they don't make things they way they used to. We had bought the television off Amazon, and luckily the customer service department said they would accept the return of the defective tv (normally they would send out a replacement but they didn't have any of that particular model in stock). Gray went out and bought a replacement, and we had to try and make the old tv fit in the box and ship it back (Amazon covered the shipping, and luckily our neighbors have an almost daily UPS pickup, so at least that part was easy).

We also caved into CABLE tv. We'd been on the limited basic for quite a while. Way back when, I remember it was only $8 or so a month. It had gone up over the years, and when the "digital revolution" took place a while back, we lost a lot of the channels we were getting (that would now require a cable box). After that change (and the addition of Netflix) we really weren't watching much (if any) tv, and I was going to cancel completely. But, as we were bundled with Internet, it would only save us about $5 a month, and I figured we'd keep it just in case we wanted to watch something.

But with the NBA lockout over, the boys REALLY wanted to watch basketball games. We looked into the "LeaguePass" offered by the NBA, but didn't feel like that would let us watch the Jazz (blackout rules affect the local teams). So we finally bit the bullet and signed up for starter cable. We're now trying out the "on demand" features we've never had before and remembering what "live tv" is ... (commercials! yuck).  Watching actual "tv" again made us want our Tivo (DVR) back (we had cancelled this service over a year ago, we just weren't using it).   We'd given one of the boxes to my mom for Christmas (I KNEW she would LOVE Tivo and had been able to get a deal on lifetime service for that box), but I did reactivate one of the other boxes for our use. Comcast and Tivo don't always get along, but I was able to figure out the connections, and it actually made the whole setup in the front room better (no more switching inputs on the TV itself, which had been a huge pain!).

So we're still fairly basic ... we don't have NBA TV, but we do get ESPN, TNT and ROOT, and pretty much all the Jazz games come to those stations, and there are quite a few other games the boys can catch too. The boys are watching a little Nick and Disney again ... Gray likes to catch the Top20 Countdown and just  surf through the multitude of new channels now available.  Awaiting that first cable bill ...