Com-Cast Your Fate To The Wind.

I just had blood drawn by a nervous phlebotomist.  If that was ever something you had noted on your bucket list, you can just go ahead and remove it.  I did it, and it wasn't that great.  I also had an appointment for said blood draw at 9:45 and didn't even go in to the blood-letting room until 10:20.

Serenity now.

If you are my friend on Facebook (which in some cultures actually differs from a friend in real life), you may know by now that I am on a quest to rid my family of the iron-clad fist that Comcast has around our...necks.  It was last month's bill that exceeded ER's monthly preschool tuition by about $60 that really fired me up.

I mentioned to Dada that I was going to embark on a crusade to slay the beast late last week and Saturday morning, I spent a good couple of hours at the computer researching, reading, looking, etc.  It was important that I know where we were/are and where we wanted to be at the end of this mess, if I was even going to find an end.

Here are some notes that I took:

It was a little hard to pick out useful information online (wow, imagine that).  Ferinstance, I found a blog post that a woman had written about getting rid of Comcast, and I got really excited, because at the top of her post she had a picture of the Comcast logo with flames and a little pitchfork next to it.  I thought, "Yes!  A soul sister!"  We were soul sisters until I read that she and her husband/boyfriend built their own cable box or some other device.  Our soul sisterhood officially ended at that point.

It seems the days of little, local, mom and pop ISP's are over.  The technology is getting bigger and faster and more expensive and I'm assuming that mom and pop can't keep up, or don't want to because they're holed up inside their 55-or-better-active-adult-compound on their 4G smartphones tweeting about every rerun of "Mama's Family" they watch on Comcast.

Photo courtesy of TelevisionHits.com

Anyway, we got tipped off about Apple TV last Friday and it sounded like the perfect solution for us.  It's a one-time purchase of a teeny, tiny little box (with a teeny, tiny little remote) for $99, then you can stream TV over your internet connection.  And there's Netflix and Hulu Plus, for movies and television so that's awesome!  We thought Apple TV was literally an answer to our prayer.  We thought.

The Netflix subscription is $7.99 a month.  Small potatoes, right?!  Definitely.  We settled in over the weekend after we set up our Apple TV to watch any movie we could think of.  We looked for Step Brothers, and Anchorman, neither of which were available, and neither of which are old movies.  What the?  I thought we had Netflix...

Streaming Netflix that costs $7.99 a month does NOT include access to the "original" Netflix through which one can access every single movie and TV series known to man (thanks to Netflix, I was able to view "Maude" in its entirety).   It's an additional subscription to get the full movie/TV offerings.  I think the total for both would be around $15/month.

I looked through the children's offerings.  There is a TON of stuff!  And there is a feature that sorts the shows by character-very cool!  But...no Disney movies.  Well, there are a couple--something with Tinkerbell and I think I saw Dumbo.  But none of the major Princess movies.  We had to go to the library yesterday and rent Tangled (OK, so we didn't have to...).  We were so hoping that with Apple TV and Netflix we would be all set with all of our viewing needs at our fingertips.  No Disney movies (or shows from the Disney Channel or Disney Jr.) just alerts me to the fact that Netflix hasn't offered Disney the right price to get its endorsement & programming yet.  It's all about the Benjamins, baby.  DVD rentals from our awesome library system are $1.50 each.  With maybe 3 or 4 a month, that's an extra $6 or so.

Dada and I are now sort of pissed, and disheartened.  We see our monthly costs starting to mount back to where they were with Comcast, after we were sure we were going to slash them drastically.

So where am I now?  Trying to find cheap, strong, reliable internet.  That's really the crux of this whole thing.  I might be out of luck there and I accept that.  Verizon FiOS isn't available on our street yet.  That would have made this whole thing very simple.  And, I can't deny that I feel played and monopolized.  I resent that we have ONE choice and are assigned a "bundle."  Must be nice to corner the market on a product that people don't really need, but have come to find is a necessity and then be able to arbitrarily name a price and have everyone pay up.  

I am sort of embracing Apple TV.  The shows that Dada and I like the most are not available, and don't seem to be available through Hulu Plus, either.  We love The Soup, Goldrush, Restaurant: Impossible, Dateline, and Moonshiners.  Don't judge.  Our tastes are varied.  Watching TV has been our nightly downtime after ER goes to bed for the past almost 3 years.  We have a huge sectional couch, and we lay about 6 feet apart from each other, both under blankets, and laugh & make snarky comments at the expense of those on TV.  It is Heaven.  If we keep Apple TV, we won't be able to do that, but we will ultimately be watching less TV, and what we do watch will be of higher quality, I believe.  

The extremely shiny silver lining in all of this is that we've got Seasons 1 & 2 of "Downton Abbey" on Netflix.  We've watched the first 2 episodes so far and are hooked.  It is FASCINATING.  I will probably have a Downton Abbey lovefest via blog post at some point soon. 

Photo courtesy of Collider.com

I just simply cannot express my love for all of you right now,
even you Dowager Countess, y'old bag.

If we decide we're going to stay with Comcast, I will be calling them and demanding requesting a generous bill slash.  Generous.  

Has anyone had success doing this?  I want to know!  To any of you who are going to try to machete your way through the jungle that is ridding yourself of a big cable company, Godspeed.  Let me know if your path leads you somewhere worth your while.