54/366 – Empty Space

6

February 23, 2012 – No more cable as of about a week ago. But we had a pretty good run for free…

Way back when, in the late 1990’s, our cable company introduced a slew of new channels and provided them to everyone as a preview. They then tried to retroactively bill anyone who didn’t call in and say “please remove them”. It didn’t go down well with the CRTC and they had to return all the retroactive billing AND visit every home to install a filter if people didn’t actively choose to subscribe to the channels. Needless to say, many people ended up getting the channels without charge since it wasn’t feasible to visit everywhere.

Somewhere back around 1999 Kirk went to work at a business up in Squamish. He was selling a lot of satellite dishes and subscriptions for two companies and they spiffed him by giving us a free dish and subscription to both services. Because we were now getting a few hundred channels for free, we called the cable company and asked them to discontinue our service. The bills stopped coming, but they never actually turned off our cable. Not that it mattered since we had satellite TV.

But then Kirk changed jobs and we gave the dishes back to the company. And wouldn’t you know it, two years after asking for the cable to be turned off, it still wasn’t. And that was the status quo until a few weeks ago when the cable company brought in digital programming and everyone was forced to use a digital box to receive any channels above 28. So we lost those, no big deal, we watch too much TV anyway.

Then, about a week or so ago, there was a knock at our door. The cable guy wanted to get into the cable room and needed the key. When he returned it he said he’d done a check and seen that several suites, including ours, were switched on even though they were not on the list of subscribers.

So, after about 12 years, we finally lost our free cable. Pretty good run though!

So Kirk has now installed an antennae on the roof and we are receiving about 7 or 8 free-to-air HD channels that cover pretty much all we really need (Global, CBC, KVOS (2 stations), CTV, CTV2, CityTV, Omni), and we catch most of the shows we usually watched before. The rest we can just download and stream to the Apple TV.

Like I said, we watched too much TV anyway.