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Sometime in the early 80s, my family made the transition from so-called wireless television (rabbit ears and rooftop antennas) to “wired” reception, via the cable company. I believe the local provider was named TKR, at least for awhile, down at the Jersey shore, and we used this nifty cable box, which was amusingly, wired to the TV. We had 36 channels, tops.

Over time, TKR became someone else, and I moved a few times, going from Cablevision to Comcast to DirecTV back to Comcast then back to Cablevision, then to Verizon’s FiOS, then back to Comcast after moving across the country to Seattle. Those experiences had some highs and lows, but one thing was consistent – paying for the television we watched, as well as what we didn’t. You begin to figure out what “works” and what doesn’t, from provider to provider.

Sometimes you’re getting what seems like a good deal when it comes to all-in-one services, such as phone, cable and Internet, and sometimes it gets to be a bit much. Is there a value in paying for a wide swath of television? Sure. Are we finally at the point where someone with a little bit of knowhow can find a “better” way to experience what they want while still providing compensation back to content creators? Absolutely.

And with that, I’m happy to announce that we’ve “cut the cord” when it comes to paying (indirectly, at least) for television.

Wired to wireless
As of this week, I’ve canceled our Comcast account, having recently ported our telephone number to Clear, and am back to the days of “wireless” television reception. We’d had both services for a few months, just to make sure it was “doable,” and finally made a move. Now, don’t get me wrong – it’s “different” than what we had before. We don’t have 24-hour cable news access. I don’t have SportsCenter on at any time I want it. The two digital antennas that are set up on the TVs in the living room and bedroom do a pretty good job with pulling in the digital signals here in downtown Seattle – though they have their choppiness every so often, so it’s still needing some fine tuning, for lack of a better word. But it feels kind of refreshing.

Here’s the breakdown. We were paying just over $200 a month for cable television, our phone line, and our Internet. The only real “premium” channel we purchased was HBO, for things like “Big Love” and “Entourage.” $200 a month is a whole lot of money, and I can’t say I was really getting the most out of the “television” portion of the bill. Additionally, as we moved to Seattle just six months ago, I felt that having a little less draw to the TV on its terms, rather than ours, would be a good thing. Do we totally veg out a number of nights a week and watch shows? Absolutely. Are we beholden to any REAL scheduling? Not really.

Sure, I’ve had DVRs and TiVos off and on for years now, but there are still things that you watch when they’re on, just because. However, I’ve found that, after having moved to the left coast, my super-connectedness via things like Twitter and Facebook make it really tough to not hear ANYTHING about what’s on, and many of my friends and colleagues are watching / talking about things hours before they even air here. I’m sure that’s not the same for everyone living in the Western U.S., but it is for me.

Time-shifting as an aside, I was really struck by the math once I started to look at what things cost, and started comparing it to how we digest things at home here of late.

You don’t always watch what you pay for
When in one of the local shopping malls, I saw that I could purchase Clear’s wireless service and add phone service for $55/month. Forever. My head calculates that there was almost $150 left that I’d previously been paying just for television, when you break it down. Now sure, it’s not a perfect calculation as my Comcast service was a bit faster on the download and the upload, but I’ve noticed no letdown from a streaming perspective on Clear. Additionally, my VoIP phone service is at the same level of quality.

So, taking it one step further, I started looking at what kinds of things I could purchase via on demand via Amazon, what shows and movies were available to stream via Netflix, which we are already paying $18/month for (making our REAL total about $220/month), and so on.

“Can I still watch all my shows?
Once I started adding up the per-episode costs at $1.99 a pop or thereabouts, or “season” subscriptions for the shows that were on the premium TV services (cable, fiber, satellite), I realized that our all-in spend would probably be more like $100-$115/month – and that’s if we PAID for everything we wanted to watch and had it automagically downloaded to the web-connected TiVos in the bedroom and living room. So things like USA’s “Burn Notice” or AMC’s “Breaking Bad” could shift to “on-demand” shows that we purchased or streamed on computers, and shows like “American Idol,” “24″ or “Lost,” to name a few, would be recorded over-the-air and watched on a whim. Interested in getting into a new show? Request it at night from Amazon – on my TV screen – and have it ready soon after.

Is the “on demand” model the same as the instantaneous nature of the cable on-demand? Not quite. But I will say that I watched about five seasons of Showtime’s awesome “Weeds” via Netflix streaming, and had no issues using the phone or Internet in the background, in great quality on my 50″ plasma.

So that’s where we are now. I haven’t even re-hooked up the Mac mini we purchased expressly for this purpose and to view our photos and videos on TV, or to play music over our home audio equipment yet. Just wait until Boxee hardware shows up.

Again, it’s not a perfect solution, but I can honestly say that we’ve “cut the cord” from television, and are still “paying” customers of television programming. We’re just not paying a third party for everything we’re not watching. So while the NYT’s Brian Stelter might be spot on about how more and more Americans continue to pay monthly fees for their television, perhaps there’ll be a day soon where Americans are simply paying for television programming, rather than the conduit for a seemingly endless supply of television they may never get to, or even realize they are “getting.”

To sum it up, I’d say that if you’re one of those people who gets most of the news, sports and weather from the web or Internet-connected devices, this is an interesting proposition. If you’re not the one who isn’t into taking an extra step or two, or waiting ten minutes for something, then maybe we’re not there yet. But we’re close, in my opinion.

I’m a fan of Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok” song, but I never expected to see it show up like this on “The Simpsons.”

Also, love Hulu’s option to edit the slate that is shown after embedding on of their videos.

On the first day of 2010, Cablevision television subscribers in the NY area might have been surprised to see that they no longer had HGTV and Food Network as part of their available cable lineups, something they might have missed, given the coverage that the News Corporation / Time Warner contract negotiations had been getting. Those organizations managed to work things out, keeping the News Corporation networks on the air for Time Warner subscribers.

The same can’t be said for those other two networks, however. On Monday afternoon, I caught this tweet by marketing consultant / blogger Katja Presnal, who had just found out about the channels going “missing” from her lineup, and saw her subsequent posts on the subject, which pointed to the I Love HGTV and I Love Food Network microsites that Scripps Networks, owners of those networks, had created to distribute information and activate affected customers. Scripps has also continued its media campaign on the issue, with Food Network President Brooke Johnson going on CNBC’s Power Lunch on Monday to discuss its position.

Both of those sites are smartly built, offering easy ways to get involved on Facebook, post directly to Twitter, watch videos, and get Scripps’ POV on the situation. For me, the first thing that jumped out was how fans of shows have made a splash before and whether or not these – again, smart and solid – tools would be enough to further this particular hard-line negotiation. What came to mind was the peanuts protest that fans of CBS’ “Jericho” enacted on the network after the show was cancelled after its first season. That particular protest worked, with some 20 tons of peanuts being sent to the network at a cost of more than $50,000, and the show returning for a second season, before ultimately being cancelled a second time.

You know what, though, people? Let’s take this whole thing to the next level. Vote with your wallets.

Now I’m not going to go down the road of a la carte television subscriptions – there are people far smarter than me that can handle that discussion. Check out what people like Tim Karr or Jeff Jarvis if you’re interested in more on that subject. I don’t want to say anything about who’s right or wrong here as I don’t know the financials involved, and have worked too closely on the network side of this type of standoff, but I’m more than happy to make a suggestion to move the needle.

Where I am going to go is that if you want to move that needle in 2010, you’ve gotta vote with your wallets, purses, PayPal accounts, and so on. Want to tell Cablevision (or Scripps Networks) how you feel about this particular situation? You’ve got a few options – you can cancel or change your service, or find another provider.

Or, you can take my suggestion, and send them a buck. Before people all start sending paint rollers or frying pans to corporate offices or whatever, take that money and make your opinion known to the powers that be, whether they be at Cablevision or Scripps Networks. In fact, I’ll put up $20 of my own singles to the first 20 Cablevision subscribers who email me (tom (at) tombiro (dot) com), and I’ll send a note on their behalf along with the dollar bill to Cablevision HQ.

No, seriously.

Listen – social media tools and campaigns like what Scripps is promoting definitely have a place, but this is going to continue to be a dollars and cents issue, especially as we start loading up on Hulu streams, Netflix instant viewing, and TV-friendly packages like Boxee become more mainstream.

So that’s my challenge – I’ll pony up twenty single dollar bills, plus postage, and the rest of you Cablevision subscribers need to do the rest.

On Thursday, Jason Kottke posted an excellent item about drinking in the office like we were all on AMC’s “Mad Men,” which is an especially funny thought, even if you’ve never watched the show. For me, this is even more funny given a conversation I was in on Wednesday night and tweeted about while walking to the Union Square subway station, that I’m including here for your reading amusement.

Check out what happened when the fine folks at Double X got their drink on, below…

Yesterday, I’d mentioned having seen the Silversun Pickups perform in the afternoon in the office, but I’d actually seen them just a few hours earlier as well – when they performed on “It’s On with Alexa Chung.” Pretty cool to have seen it from the control room, but this is what aired on television as they performed “Panic Switch.”

Okay, so last night, Carly Smithson was voted off American Idol in a “shocker,” a word that I think only begins to sum it up. I don’t see exactly how she missed the mark in her “Jesus Christ Superstar” performance, especially when you compare it up to the disastrous performance that Jason Castro threw down with “Memory.”

This brings to light – again – the fact that voting on this show definitely throws people for a loop. People seem to vote HARD for people they LOVE and those that they LOVE TO KEEP ON THE SHOW, not the ones that actually do the best job, consistently. I wouldn’t even know where to start in saying who’s to “blame” for something like this, but I’ll say that unless it’s David Cook that ultimately wins this show, it wouldn’t surprise me if any album that Carly Smithson got to do after being thrown off the show outsold anything that the eventual winner did over the haul. Of course, this is my opinion, but if you listen to a lot of music (I do), I just don’t see how she was the weakest performer – at all – especially when she was put in a bottom two with Syesha Mercado, whom I am not the hugest fan of as an “Idol” in the long term, but who did a killer job on Tuesday night.

The voting is just so seemingly random. One week you seem to be based on the work you did that week, even if you were perfect eight weeks in a row prior. The next week you’re voted on how you might actually rank in the overall grand scheme (and Syesha in the bottom rung isn’t too off-base when you look at it that way). But seriously, folks, how could Carly Smithson be a lesser performer than ANYONE except maybe David Cook in the long haul? And what, Brooke White gets the sympathy vote because people like her in general and she had a disastrous performance? I just don’t get it.

/stupid rant

So it appears that high definition programming has a side effect that I really hadn’t expect, the one of making my cat decide that all moving objects should be swatted at. I had thought he’d be out of control once the television was put up on the wall and there was a way for him to reach it, but nothing really happened for awhile. All of a sudden in the last two weeks or so, he’s decided that sitting on top of the electronics in front of the television and waiting for moving objects that he’d like to slay. Regular television doesn’t cause much of this behavior, but things like NASCAR, where he can sit there and swipe at cars as they go around the bend, and hockey, where there are contrasting colors that make for easy prey, seem to be his favorites. So, after almost a year of having no issues with the television being accessible, there’s now more than a fair share of cat paw prints all over my television. Oh well. Such is life, I suppose.

Well, Jimmy Kimmel apparently had had enough of the fun that girlfriend Sarah Silverman had pulled on him a short while ago when she announced that she was … ahem … knowing Matt Damon, so Jimmy responded in the only way he knows how – to get with Ben Affleck, of course.

Probably NSFW for most of you, but everyone’s going to be talking about it, so you should make a point to check it out later.