I was born in the 1950's, a time when you had a party line telephone, three channels on your black and white television and most folks had only single car garages. With a dollar, you could go to the drugstore, or the local five & dime and get a whole bag of penny candy. What a great time to grow up.
Why am I reminiscing? I just paid my Time Warner Cable television bill. TWO HUNDRED-SEVENTEEN ($217.00) U.S. dollars! Yep, you read it right. Sounds more like a small car payment. About a year ago, my bill was about $179.00, so I cancelled the Movie Channel and Cinemax, to lower my monthly payment and have not added anything new, but somehow my bill keeps going up outrageously high. Now this got me to thinking about true pay-per view television. Currently, I have three different tiers of channels. Lets call them Basic, Digital and High Definition. Sounds great right? Nope! Time Warner brags about how many channels they offer, but they are the same channels. You really only get 50. 50 channels x 3 tiers = 150. Do you get the idea? Same channel, different tier. What a bargain. Oh yeah, by the way, if you have the high definition tier, you get the privilege of paying more for the channels that you don't receive with that tier. Up, up, up, we go!
Ok, are you disgusted yet? If we are all going to pay for pay-per view television, why can't we get the channels we want to watch? Instead of paying for the trash channels, some of which you can't even understand what they're saying, (don't forget, some peoples trash is other peoples treasure) let us only buy the channels we want. If they can separate the channels to pay for, why not separate them all and let us pick? Back to the 50's for a second. Back then it didn't cost you anything except electricity to watch television, so you got what you got. How can you complain about free? Back to now. In some cities, not only do you have to pay big bucks to watch TV, you also have to pay a "franchise fee". What? What the heck is that? Well, this is a fee that goes to your local community that the cable company has to pay to be the sole cable provider in that area, but YOU have to pay it. Yes sir, no other cable company but the one you're stuck with. Oh sure, there are the satellite dishes if you choose, but then there goes that thing on your roof.
Franchise fee! Sounds to me like a case of "taxation without representation"! I have to pay my local community for a cable company, that I didn't choose, to have service. As citizens, we didn't even get to vote for a cable company. If we have to pay, give us a say so. Well, maybe I should vote it's time to do away with "Time". Guess my momma wasn't the only one to raise a FOOL.
Out of Bounds contributor
I guess, maybe we all should ask Time Warner to have a three tier for Telemundo HD channel. This is exactly what we need to learn the language of all those illegals entering our country. Can we all say......¡La jodimos!
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