3 Reasons Why It Is Not Yet Time to Cut the Cord
Cord-cutting does not actually involve the destruction of any cables. It also does not indicate any cables powering your entertainment system will be eliminated. A cord-cutter can end up with just as many cables as anyone else.
To understand the term, think umbilical cord. Cutting that cord means that the newborn is physically independent of her mother, and can eat and drink on her own.
In terms of programmatic entertainment, cutting the cord refers to the umbilical attaching you to the cable company. It implies that you are independent of the provider mothership. And you can take in entertainment on your own terms.
That is the dream for many people, and has been for a long time. Some are living that life right now, at least partially. But others are waiting until things get a bit easier. Even if you are interested in cutting the cord, there are reasons why you might want to wait a little longer. Here are three:
Live Sports
There are tons of workarounds for getting lives sports without having a content provider package. The reason they are called workarounds is that they are not quite fully baked solutions – or technically legal for that matter.
When you check out local DIRECTV service, you will see why no workaround stacks up favorably to what you can get with a dedicated content provider with regard to sports. You get every football game that can be legally aired for one bundle price. For football fans, nothing else even comes close.
All of the major sports have a provider-free solution. But that solution is often very expensive, and nothing like the convenience you get with a traditional provider. And convenience counts for a lot.
It is not just about special features like Red Zone. It is the basic convenience of having local channels that give you local games without the need for OTA antenna solutions. One can easily imagine a time in the near future when the sports piece of the cord-cutting puzzle is in place. But it is not there at this time.
Live, Local News
There were a thousand ways to keep up with election results. But none of those ways was a convenient as turning on the TV and flipping to pretty much any channel. And while presidential election coverage is pretty easy to find, those local results need local TV and local papers.
Perhaps if you live in one of the major cities like New York or San Francisco, you will find broader interest in what is otherwise local news. But if you live in average to small town America, nobody other than locals really care about what is happening in your particular neck of the woods.
It is also a matter of immediacy. When you need to know about local school or business closures, you don’t have time to dig around in social media hoping to find out something about your kid’s school. You need to be able to turn on the TV and have that information scrolling in the lower-third right away. For the moment, no cord-cutting solution fully replicates the locality and immediate of local channels.
TV Shows
Right now, the best must see TV experience for the latest shows comes from a traditional content provider. Sure, there are streaming, on-demand services that will help keep you caught up on your favorite shows. But they are often called catch-up services because that is mostly what they are for.
What those services cannot do is give you access to those shows day and date of airing. If you want to talk about what happened on your favorite show around the water cooler the following day at work, you need a content provider.
There is also the matter of recording vs. on-demand. That season you were planning to watch might be gone tomorrow. And there is nothing you can do about it. Having your own copy on a DVR makes all the difference in whether you actually watch your favorite show or not.
Live sports, local news, and TV shows can be enjoyed by other means. But nothing comes close to the convenience, price, and peace of mind of having a traditional content provider. The reality of cord-cutting is not quite equal to the dream.
