The cable TV debate

Before we moved to our new place, one of the first questions I posed to Dave was: “Are you subscribing to cable TV?” Or to be more specific, a 3rd party content provider.

The impetus for me to asked this is because Dave is a huge soccer fan. He loves watching soccer games and as we all know it, one of the biggest league is the English (Barclays) Premier League, and is only available on cable, or rather, Singtel Mio.

Rather than an immediate YES, “I need to think about it” was his reply.

Fast forward this almost 6 months later, we do not have a cable TV subscription. No Starhub, no Singtel, no whatever.

All we got was just a Smart TV.

And I love it!

We stream a lot of programmes on youtube and other sites and play them on the TV. The best thing is, we could even pause them at whichever instant we wanted (fancy a short bathroom break?), and select the programmes that we wanted to watch (based on whatever is available). It’s kind of similar to playing a DVD.

To be honest, we did shop around for cable plans initially, and I had thought of subscribing to a plan that has baby or kids channels as well, so that Ally can watch them.

Some of the plans were not exactly costly. One of the basic packages that we saw from Starhub had a bundle up of some kids and movie channels and they were at an additional $16 if we top-up based on our existing internet subscription.

But in it end, we wonder if we really needed them.

In the first place, we don’t really watch TV as much anymore. It doesn’t help that with the prevalence of internet tv, I often stream movies, dramas and animes on my laptop instead. Also, the free-to-air tv stations here has been airing pretty crappy shows over the last few years, so I had really cut down the time I watch local tv, or rather, programmes played on the free-to-air channels. As such, the only time that I really sit down and watch TV is probably during dinner, when the TV happens to be turned on anyway for the family and I just happen to catch whatever programme was played on that timeslot.

As for Ally, since the local tv stations don’t play much kids programmes, except on certain dedicated timeslots, we normally just stream programmes on youtube for her to watch on the phone selectively.

So, it doesn’t seem that we need that cable TV subscription with perhaps the exception of the soccer channel for Dave…

Dave too decided, that he could live without watching soccer. He hasn’t been watching it regularly for a while and concluded that it is something that he could do without. He normally watches the match highlights on youtube following the matches. In addition, seldom do we have the chance to watch a show uninterrupted for 2 hours when you have a curious toddler around you.

Hence, we decided to do without cable TV. It wasn’t so much of the financial commitment, (although I must add that it would be rather pricey at a few hundred bucks per year considering our low rate of utilisation), but rather after assessing our situation and needs, we decided not to subscribe to one.

And that is one less financial outlay for us as well.