14 thoughts on “Dialing back on the cable bill”

1. Norm March 10, 2012 at 8:53 am

   When we downsized our Oceanic service several years ago Oceanic bundled our basic +TV with our roadrunner service for a better price. I would stay away from their phone service. If you loose power it is down but Hawaiian Tel is still up and running.

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2. curious george March 10, 2012 at 10:17 am

   at some point the kids will be asking, “what’s cable tv?” right after they try to figure out what a news paper was…

   we have moved, along with numerous other family friends, to an arrangement similar to yours. including the RR speed boost. it makes a ton of sense. and you’ll find that there are a few channels that come with basic service that aren’t listed. might depend on the filter they use, but be sure to click through after the service change. we still get espn news, comedy central, AnE, TBS, and a few more that aren’t part of the package… an added bonus for sure. ION movie HD. TnT. quite a few actually… plus all the broadcast channels in HD, most in 1080…

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3. Aaron Stene March 10, 2012 at 3:24 pm

   Yes, Oceanic’s digital phone service won’t work if the power goes out. However, it is much cheaper
   than Hawaiian Tel’s service. My parents got unlimited local and nationwide phone service for 19.95 a month. They were paving close to 60.00
   a month with HawTel.

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4. cwd March 10, 2012 at 8:52 pm

   Could you please translate what you wrote into basic English for non-tech people? My computer is a 2003 Dell Desktop with a 13-1/2 inch monitor. My iPhone screen is even smaller.

   All I watch are ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, PBS, ESPN,`Olelo shows. SigOth likes to watch a couple of nutburger political/comedic networks as well, but we don’t have any of the high-end cable channels.

   I believe that it’s our Internet service is what jacks up our cable bill – not the tv shows. However, I am certainly no expert so perhaps someone can explain it to me in terms/words I can understand.

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5. Bill March 11, 2012 at 1:24 am

   Wavecomm Solutions (808netphone) offers another alternative for those wanting an internet phone service. The cheapest plan is about $15 a month. They have good local based customer service.

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6. rlb_hawaii March 11, 2012 at 5:59 am

   Here are the cable stations I want:

   CBS
   NBC
   ABC
   Fox
   CNN
   ESPN (and its incarnations like ESPN2, ESPNU, etc. sports fan, you know)
   FoxSports West (LA Angels baseball and LA Clippers basketball)
   TNT
   Comedy Central
   Cartoon Network

   That’s it. Out of more than 100 stations available, I just want to pay for 10.

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7. rlb_hawaii March 11, 2012 at 6:00 am

   Btw, you guys watching Downtown Abbey? That show freakin’ rules.

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8. Badvertiser March 11, 2012 at 8:02 am

   http://archives.starbulletin.com/2003/01/20/features/index2.html

   There’s the problem, reported a decade ago in the Star-Bulletin and apparently never addressed by Oceanic.

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9. hugh clark March 11, 2012 at 8:42 am

   I’d sign up for Direct TV in a minute if it would answer its calls. Oceanic phone service is a disaster for Big Islanders who suffer frequent power outages.

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10. Larry March 11, 2012 at 6:38 pm

    There are several choices for Internet phone. I pay $75 a year. It has lots of bells and whistles. There are cheaper plans with even more minutes, but I went with one that was recommended. You have to buy an adapter–after initial expenses it’s just savings year after year. Voicemail is also sent to my email, a great convenience. I can have more than one outgoing line on the same number, because it’s no longer dependent on two copper wires coming into my place. Quality is usually much better than Haw Tel because wireline telephone is strictly bandwidth limited, tuned basically to a typical male voice.

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11. mel March 11, 2012 at 7:55 pm

    I literally “cut the cord” to my Oceanic cable subscription last January, 2011. This after my TV broke and the standard analog bill at that time went to $63 for the mostly tired cable channels, most of which I was not watching.

    Today I am web only, no pay services of any kind for TV reception. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. I watch a lot of YouTube, a lot of the free content on Hulu.com, network TV shows on CBS (Hawaii Five-0) and ABC.

    For local news on my MacBook Pro it seems only Hawaii News Now stream works (with the required Microsoft Silverlight plug in)…. I tried KITV’s network stream and it never works.

    That said I watch snippets of selected news reports on local station websites as well as on the big network websites. Plus there is a lot of other news content to view on other sites.

    While I do have a Mac, I don’t buy or rent any video content from iTunes. I use that mainly for music and a handful of podcasts to view or listen to.

    Otherwise it’s mostly talk radio and random streams for me when I want to be entertained. Plus I have a 400+ video DVD library in my home, so I get my movies and classic TV shows from there too.

    The key for me is to avoid all monthly subscription plans. It can be done. And someday when I do get a replacement TV I will just get the few, free over the air digital channels that I can get in my area.

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12. skeptical once again March 13, 2012 at 10:26 am

    Is TV going the way of newspapers?

    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/arts/television/nbc-brings-community-back-to-its-passionate-fan-base.html

    The key paragraphs from this article:

    The event, he said, that brought the show back from near death was a deal in December with the Web site Hulu, making earlier episodes available to an audience that had not yet caught up to them. This experience dovetailed with what he called anecdotal evidence that “Community” is one of the first shows of the so-called post-television era.

    Mr. Harmon said, “The most coveted demographic, and most coveted of that demographic, these very smart, upwardly mobile, college-age kids just don’t watch TV anymore.”

    Of course, even if Mr. Harmon is right, and a huge part of the “Community” audience is going unmeasured, it doesn’t help either NBC or the show where it counts: advertising revenue. The sense that perhaps the network could do better was behind the decision to pull the comedy off the air.

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13. skeptical once again March 13, 2012 at 2:44 pm

    Here’s a mental exercise….

    Close your eyes and think about the 1950s.

    What is it that comes to mind?

    I think of a jumble of things. These all relate to the rise of various things:

    –the US as a world power and the dominant economy;
    –the nuclear family and suburban life;
    –car culture and popular music available on car stereos (especially rock music);
    –youth culture, and a consumerism geared toward the spending power of young people;
    –telephones, television, and B movies in movie theaters;
    –nuclear power and the Cold War.

    Obviously, the Soviet Union ceased to exist two decades ago. But all these other things have recently begun to vanish as well, some more gradually (the nuclear family and nuclear power) and others more suddenly.

    The older generation does not seem to get it. That’s peculiar in some ways because the older generation today grew up during this 1950s/1960s period and experienced their own generation gap. But their thinking is still in the past.

    One sees this with the suburbs. One continuously hears from the real estate and home building industry about a “pent up demand for housing” on the part of young adults who live with their parents. But when these young adults do leave the nest, they tend not to buy houses, but rather move into the cities and rent apartments. They don’t own land-line phones; in fact, they don’t even own PCs. They own a laptop, a cell phone and a tablet computer, and maybe an e-reader. They are nomadic.

    This nomadism is something that us older coots might do well to emulate. So here’s another mental exercise….

    Imagine that you are going to move in six months to someplace 7000 miles away. Now what do you want to buy? New chinaware? Maybe not. A new smart phone? Maybe. A space heater? Sure, if it doesn’t cost to much. A new couch? No, unless it’s off of craiglist (and the seller delivers). A cable TV connection? No, of course not. Why not? Because nobody even owns a TV nowadays.

    But try telling that to the older generation!

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    1. skeptical once again March 14, 2012 at 11:23 am

       A NYT article on the closing of the Encyclopedia Britannica:

       http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/after-244-years-encyclopaedia-britannica-stops-the-presses/

       Regarding my observation that it is 1950s technology that is rapidly disappearing:

       In the 1950s, having the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the bookshelf was akin to a station wagon in the garage or a black-and-white Zenith in the den, a possession coveted for its usefulness and as a goalpost for an aspirational middle class. Buying a set was often a financial stretch, and many families had to pay for it in monthly installments.

       But in recent years, print reference books have been almost completely overtaken by the Internet and its vast spread of resources, including specialized Web sites and the hugely popular — and free — online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

       Since it was started 11 years ago, Wikipedia has moved a long way toward replacing the authority of experts with the wisdom of the crowds. The site is now written and edited by tens of thousands of contributors around the world, and it has been gradually accepted as a largely accurate and comprehensive source, even by many scholars and academics.

       How some in the older generation are adopting:

       Charles Fuller, a geography professor who lives in the Chicago suburbs, put his 1992 edition on sale on Craigslist last Sunday. For years, he has neglected the print encyclopedias, he said in an interview, and now prefers to use his iPhone to look up facts quickly. He and his wife are downsizing and relocating to California, he said, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica will not be coming with them, a loss he acknowledges with a hint of wistfulness.

       “They’re not obsolete,” Mr. Fuller said. “When I’m doing serious research, I still use the print books. And they look really beautiful on the bookshelves.”

       Now, this is relevant to David Shapiro’s observation that the Hawaii candidates for the US Senate are not exactly spring chicks.

       The issue for Shapiro is that none of these candidates will achieve seniority in the Senate because they are already relatively old.

       But perhaps this idea that a candidate needs to achieve seniority in the US Senate in order to become this greatly revered, paternalistic patriarch who channels massive funds — basically looted from another society — into old-fashioned development schemes is itself a symptom of Old Thinking. This kind of thinking has perhaps contributed to Hawaii’s economy becoming less diversified over the years and encouraged a mentality of passive dependence.

       My reservation is that the thinking of all of these candidates is rooted in the 1950s. In fact, I would argue that even President Obama, who is about ten years younger than these candidates, has his thinking rooted very much in pre-1960s mode. Obama is very much an academic elitist who believes that we should all cast aside this silly ideological partisanship, not in order to work together as ordinary citizens rising above our differences, but to put the scientific experts in charge (holding himself up as a prime example). Along with Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, Obama has been described as one of the few presidents who is a professional intellectual; and yet the intellectual debates since the 1950s center around the problematic of technocracy or the ‘rule of experts’ (e.g., should political or social studies be treated as a science?, and just what is a ‘science’?). That’s rather disturbing and bizarre from an intellectual viewpoint. (From a practical viewpoint, its disturbing that he seems to be somewhat incompetent in terms of policy, despite his own immense confidence in himself and despite his contempt of petty politics; his area of “expertise” seems primarily in public relations and imagery.)

       So who is it in the US Senate race who has the most flexible way of thinking?

       Ed Case presents himself as the Pepsi generation … but so did Obama.

       Perhaps one litmus test of would be an emphasis on economic diversification. In this regard, one would suspect that Mazie Hirono would be most likely to support public education. But one gets a feeling that it would not be reform that she would be interested in, but hiring more school bureaucrats.

       Lingle stands alone in Hawaii for her bold pronouncement that “There is more to economic development than land development.” But her idea of economic diversification seems to have been … the SuperFerry (which some say was really an unrealistic bid at land development on the outer islands).

       So the question for me remains: “Will the least old-fashioned candidate please step forward?”

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