Well, that was interesting but didn't really apply to me.
I've been watching the "cable" channels on DirecTV less and less as time has passed. The channels that were my favorites -- Discovery and History -- are shadows of their former selves. Heck, even Adam and Jamie only do a handful of new "Mythbusters" episodes a year now.
And here in L.A., we poor subscribers have been caught in the middle of the "Time Warner Cable vs. every other provider" battle over the Dodgers. Since the beginning of last season (yes, since April of 2014!) Time Warner's insistence that everyone other than them pay through the nose per subscriber (and no, they won't allow it to be offered as a premium channel ... every subscriber in the Los Angeles DMA would pay, whether they care about the Dodgers or not) has earned them the hatred of every non-Time Warner customer in the region. But I kept my DirecTV on, hoping for a resolution. Meanwhile, as the amount of attractive programming continued to drop, I started watching the digital subchannels of the local stations.
I get pretty much all the retro channels, and the ad-supported movie channels, using a little Zenith box that I bought when the big conversion happened, routed through my TiVo. (I have an old Series 2 model which will work with any external cable/satellite/digital broadcast box. With lifetime subscription.)
Well, a couple of months ago, I realized we weren't going to be getting the Dodgers by the end of this season either, so I pulled the plug, moved the Zenith box to the primary TiVo input, and haven't had a problem since. Given that I don't care about recent movies, etc., no need to stream online. I get near-perfect reception of the broadcast stations, on an old antenna in the attic of my apartment building which has been there for at least 20 years, because it's aimed right at Mount Wilson and I'm less than 30 miles away as the crow flies.
I think we're about to see the great expansion of cable programming from the late 1990s implode as all these "flavors" of channels get less and less viewers. (How many MTVs are there now? Six?) I'm sure I'm not the last person to leave them behind.
I only worry that the post-auction repacking may cause distribution problems for the subchannels and that some of those specialty networks will go away as a result. I also worry that my TiVo may not have the infrared codes that will work with whatever box I have to replace the current one with when the transmission standard changes.
And I'm both industry-knowledgeable and tech savvy. Heaven help lesser viewers.
