Is cord cutting contagious?

Off Topic
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Before the fall of 2013, I knew no one personally that had cut the cord.  That fall, my sister and her family decided to cut the cord, and they didn’t go nuts.   :wink:


I did it in April of 2014 when the Tablo first came out, more to prove to my wife that I was capable of doing something like this (since I was the primary TV watcher in the house).  Since then, I have had 3 or 4 of my coworkers cut the cord, and this week my best friend did it as well.

It is a trend that is certainly not going away.  I just wanted the people here to tell their stories about their friends and family. 
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No doubt, when I asked my wife about it she was actually happy because she said the kids watched too much TV anyway. So no need to pay for channels we were not even watching. So Fall of 2013 we cut… Tivo OTA at the time. And like you I found friends started this year and about a month ago a friend of mine bought a Tablo too on my recommendation!  

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We cut our cord less than a year ago.  I figured I was somewhat of a “pioneer” family wise.

My brother lives over seas, and we do not get to see each other often, but we had a short visit and he described how his son had set up this “thing” called a Plex server for him, etc… “Wow!”  (great minds think alike)

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In answer to your question - “I hope so”.


@cjcox - either that or devious minds think alike…  a lot of outlaws in the old west traveled in gangs. 

You don’t really even need an excuse or a cord to cut - Tablo and things like it can prevent you from going to the dark side to begin with. The force can save you from the cord, keep you from ever experiencing the bad ol’ cord. All you need is to be old-skool, have kept your antenna on the roof, never drank the cable or satellite KoolAid, never fallen into the “you gotta pay if you want good stuff” trap where you are baited with low prices and then they keep squeezing until you can’t stand it any more…
We never fell into the cord trap. We knew that free broadcast TV had never gone away, it was ALWAYS there regardless of what the cable companies wanted you to believe. I never had to put up a new antenna, we still have the antenna from many years ago. For one thing, we don’t have time to make cable or satellite worth the extraordinary money they cost. What? hundreds of dollars a year to sit in a chair and watch over-paid under-skilled people make millions of dollars for a week’s work? It was never ever “worth it” to have cable even at only 30 bucks a month. That’s over 300 I could use for more fun stuff. And to sit hours each evening or weekend and do nothing useful, accomplish no creations or have nothing to show for it. naw.

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@snowcat Great Idea!!

My oldest daughter and her husband cut the cord 3 years ago mainly to save money. My son in-law had never been a TV watcher but he is a self confessed geek. He has his own software development company. He and I have geek contest actually. They just went Apple TV and nothing else.

We cut the cord in September. I do like that it saves money but I really just had heartburn about paying for something I never used. We were paying for 200+ channels just to get about 9 or 10 we wanted. I actually only had 12 channels programmed into the DirecTV Guide. We used the networks for a few shows we DVR every week. The rest of the channels we watched were not available OTA but we compromised and said we would be better off without them. We actually watched Netflix and Amazon Instant more than TV so we got the Tablo and never looked back. Then SlingTV sped by turning our heads.

The other channels we watched when we had DirecTV were CNN, ESPN, DIY, HGTV, and Food Network, occasionally TBS, and The Cooking Channel. It is like SlingTV was designed for us. I just wish we could get them all in the basic package but what the heck it's only $25 vs. $90 and I wont be paying for over 200 channels I never watch.

I am also a heavy PLEX user for streaming my BluRays to the TV. I am at just over 13TB and counting.

I just need to get my son in-law to write some code that lets me use the Tablo to DVR SlingTV. Any of you other self confessed geeks up to the challenge? Seams like if they are both on a network one should be able to pull them together?
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For the last few years I’ve been using a Toshiba combo VHS/DVD recorder. The VHS part finally went the way they oft do and it got hungry for tapes and started eating them for each meal. So we went DVD. That are smaller anyway - more reliable, etc. I started recording TV to DVD-RW if we just wanted to record and watch what we might otherwise miss, or to DVD-R if we wanted to keep something long-term and save it for all of eternity (or the live of a DVD disk, which ever came first)

Enter the Internet and the myth that everyone has a super-fast unlimited broadband connection in this country - leading to the inability to buy DVD-RW dsks that would work with our recorder. OK, so we could have caught up on watching shows and simply erased and re-used and I did that a lot, but we recorded more than we could watch and I didn’t exactly LABEL every disk… so it would mean going through a STACK of over 100 disks to find one with some space, or watching and then erasing, etc. Plus too often we’d be away on some evenings when there were two shows we really really wanted to record and we had to make a choice-  record A and miss B or…
I had been looking for a DVR that wasn’t connected to some bloody over-priced, under-reliable “tv service” like cable (we can’t get cable out here anyway) or satellite (are you kidding? Satellite in Iowa with snow, ice and rain storms that cause you to LOSE TV for hours on end? Or you have to go de-ice or de-snow something so you can watch TV in the winter?

I had used satellite Internet and it sucked big time. Slow, over-subscribed and a big hassle if it rained or there was ice on the dish (those commercials for cable don’t lie about dish or satellite services and the weather!)
And paying a fee to watch what’s free otherwise? Are you nuts? I’d rather than that 300-400+ a year and put it into my cars, the house, anything but sitting and watching expensive TV when there’s free stuff out there. 
I looked, found no DVR that wasn’t attached to a gotcha and monthly cost. That was a year ago, and 2 years ago. Then last fall/early winter I looked again and saw a new name.
No cable required. No satellite required. No monthly fee if you didn’t WANT to pay for the program guide and better yet, multiple tuners so our Tuesday night and other night problems were solved, record all we want when gone. No more disks, find your show pretty easily (will be better with future sort options - hint-hint) but wait, there’s more - not tied to a specific TV.
So there was no cord to cut, I never drank the Kool aid, never fell for the “you are missing a lot without us and our fees” BS. I never once believed OTA had gone away. None of us in our family ever had cable, ever. I knew satellite stunk and was unreliable in this state. When things went digital that was even better as now instead of 5, 8, 11, 13 and 17 we had 5.1, 5.2, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 and so on, instead of FIVE channels to choose from with often crappy programming, we had 18 to choose from and almost more than we have time to watch without a recorder. 
18 channels, free, can record up to 4 at a time, I get my World and other channels, science, mystery, oldies, westerns, weather, you name it. The only games we’ve ever cared about are the Olympics and that’s broadcast free so we’re in TV heaven now with all the digital OTA choices. 

We don’t own 200+ movies because frankly we have things to do, work, acreage, hobbies and such and so don’t sit many hours a week so we’ve never had a need for a media center per se, so far there hasn’t been a need to rip countless DVD or Blu Ray to a media server, etc. Could change in the future but we are so seldom bored and too often have more to do than time to do it, especially me, so simple and fast is good. 2 hours a day is a lot for me. 3 to 4 a day is my max. If I watch a movie it MUST be 100% action and things going on. I can’t sit through slow movie moments. Examples of movies that keep me sitting were the first of the recent Star Trek movies, the first “prequel” - it was almost non-stop so it kept my attention. But let a movie slow down a bit and I’m off elsewhere. Man of Steel was another, the old Terminator movies - fast or I’m gone.

By the way - I mentioned in a meeting we had today that I was using Chrome for access to my DVR (our developers were having issues with our in-house app and browsers) and I was asked what DVR I was using… I explained the Tablo concept and 2 people wrote the name down so you may be getting some more hits on the site.
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The Cable companies keep on the same path with by jacking with people and rising prices.   Cord cutting is just going to become more and more popular.   


If I could just get my internet though an antenna. I could get Comcast out of my life forever!.
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2015 will be the year that cord cutting goes mainstream. We just need to surf that wave :D 



(PS - If you want to share your cord cutting tips & tricks with the world, consider participating in our blog series on this topic. If you want to participate, just shoot me a PM or an email!) 
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The Cable companies keep on the same path with by jacking with people and rising prices.   Cord cutting is just going to become more and more popular.   

If I could just get my internet though an antenna. I could get Comcast out of my life forever!.

You can, sort of, but with limited data.
We got a Netgear 2200d and hooked it up to our cellular data plan. It’s a router, hotspot, access point, whatever and works fine. You don’t get the bazillion terabytes of data at zilabyte transfer speeds of comunistcast but it’s good if you don’t watch movies over the Internet.
Besides, no cable company will service most folks in rural areas and we can’t get DSL out here. It’s Iowa, ranked about 48 or 49 in connectivity out of 50 states so take that into account. 

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I cut the cord and now a friend has as well and a cousin seeing how painless it was for me… (they don’t have tablo’s yet but I think that will change) … I also have a few other family and some friends asking a lot of deep complex questions about it … my plex server, the tablo … and how it all works for us.


(fwiw a few of us also returned our rented cable modems from the cable co and got our own privately owned ones (thank you woot!) … just to save even a few more bucks … )