Gamechanger?: How Would You Like to Cancel Your Obnoxiously Expensive Cable Service?

DHD dismisses this, but I don’t think they understand how tired many of us are of paying outrageous cable bills for television we don’t watch:

Aereo[,] [t]he company, backed in part by Barry Diller, just announced that it will go live in New York City on March 14. Residents willing to pay $12 a month will be able to stream signals from local over-the-air TV channels, and watch their shows on demand with the functionality of a 40-hour, dual antenna DVR. The service will only work as long as users are in the local market — not, say, if they’re on a vacation or business trip. Aereo execs expect lots of people to subscribe, perhaps in conjunction with Netflix, as a substitute for the $65 a month cable or satellite TV package. That could be revolutionary, Greenfield writes today in a blog post: “If Aereo is in fact legal, we find it hard to fathom that the traditional (pay TV) bundle will survive and that retrans payments will continue to scale as broadcasters are expecting them to over the next several years.” If he’s right, then it’s the end of the media world as we know it. The giants make most of their profits from the fees they collect for their bundled channels.

That last sentence is crucial: The giants make most of their profits from the fees they collect for their bundled channels.

And that’s the scam. This appalling reality where neither your local cable company or the two primary satellite providers allow you to purchase only what you want to watch is an unspoken monopoly. Most of us are paying obnoxiously high bills for only a few channels. This is how Hollywood keeps their boot on the neck of the culture, how they keep channels running nobody likes. 200,000 people watch Rosie O’Donnell’s talk show on OWN. Rosie O’Donnell hates conservatives, but conservatives still help to pay her salary through their cable bills. Same with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It’s impossible to imagine how such low-rated shows would survive otherwise.

You might ask how a Rosie can impact the culture if only 200,000 people watch her. Well, look at how few people watch “The Daily Show,” Colbert and “30 Rock.” These are pathetically low-rated shows that have a major impact because they know how to play the game: Become liberal darlings and as a result the liberal media — Politico, MSNBC, CNN, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly — will create the false impression that you’re some kind of phenom. This is how the left makes mainstream thought feel like minority, and it ALL STARTS with your cable bill.

Because I’m out in the middle of nowhere, this $12 a month service will never work because it’s antennae-based (and will have to remain so in order to stay legal). So cancelling my package isn’t going to be easy because we will lose some programming we enjoy and have nothing to replace it with … other than streaming. Hopefully, though, this new local-based service will prove to be enough of a success that the idea catches on.

Regardless, on principle, as soon as my Dish contract is up, we will cancel.

It’s time to unplug.

For America.