This is the endBeautiful friendThis is the endMy only friend, the end
My parents' long-canceled cable credentials have finally stopped working. I knew this day would come, and so it has. Yet, I rue not my loss, rather I celebrate what was mine for so long.
Some years ago, I don't remember exactly when, probably around 2016, my parents bought a cable subscription from a company called Click! Network. When we came out to visit once, my dad gave me the credentials to watch something on my tablet, and I just kept using them after we left. It was perfect because Click! was one of the few online providers that never initiated two-factor authentication. For a while, I used my friend JY's Xfinity account, but they started making me put in a text message code every time I logged in, and so I would have to text him to text me the code they texted him, and it just got to be too annoying, presumably for the both of us. But Click! didn't require that extra step. I could just put in the user name and password and start watching -- ESPN, TNT, TBS, FS1, and every now and then NFL Network would work for some reason, even though it wasn't included in the package. It was great.
Then, maybe three years ago, I was talking to my dad, and I mentioned that I still used his cable credentials, and he told me, much to my surprise, that he canceled their Click! account several years before that. So, doing the math, they probably canceled it around 2019, which means that I used cable credentials from a defunct account for about six years. That is a damn good freeloading run. The credentials just kept working. At first, I thought to myself Surely, this is the time they fail. But then they didn't, and so I started expecting them to work, and they did, right up until five days ago. I tried to log-in to TNT to watch a basketball game, and they don't even list Click! as an acceptable provider anymore. Then I tried ESPN, and Click! is still listed as a provider, but when I click the link, I just get a useless blank white box on the screen. It's possible that if I could get the Click! credentials box to pop up, like it used to, my parents' credentials would still work, but I can't figure out how to do that, and I can't exactly call tech support about it. So, I'm just accepting the L on this one, because it's not really an L. It's a glorious W that finally ended.
Nevertheless, this whole thing left me ESPN-less, and that wouldn't do, as ESPN is a must-have for live sports watchers like me. The Mother Ship might be losing its influence in the world of sport in other ways, but it is still very much a leader in live product, with Monday Night Football, the college football playoffs, the NBA playoffs, and the NHL playoffs, among other programming. It's also one of the few remaining pure cable channels, which makes it a super annoying must-have. To my knowledge -- and I just researched it fairly extensively -- there is no way to stream ESPN without buying a full-on cable package. It's not available with any other streaming service, and it's not offered as a standalone product. You might think it is, because they have something called ESPN+, but you would be wrong. ESPN+ is the most blatant case of fraudulent advertising since Lionel Hutz's case against the movie The Never Ending Story. Despite the name, ESPN+ doesn't actually contain ESPN. It's just a different network with less popular programming. It's like if Apple marketed their watch as the iPhone+.
So, I broke down and bought a subscription to something called Sling TV. It was the only service I could find that allows me to stream ESPN for under $50 a month. It's $110 for three months, but I think that's just a promotional rate, and I'll have to pay about $10 more per month after that. So, if I want to keep it, I'll have to decide whether I'm going to pay more or do the thing where you unsubscribe and subscribe anew with a different email address to get the promotional rate again. If I used all my and all S's email accounts, I could stretch it out a few years, and then maybe by that time there will be a better option. Or maybe if I just click the button to unsubscribe, they'll offer to extend the promotional rate. That's what happened with the New York Times. They sent me an email telling me my trial period was over, and I would soon be getting charged substantially more, so I turned off auto-renewal, and immediate got another email essentially saying, Psych! You can keep paying what you're paying now. We were just joking.
One thing I learned from all this is that despite all the cord-cutting and the advent of individual network streaming services, bundled TV packages are still very much a thing, and they are still very much overpriced. YouTube TV is like $85 a month; Fubo is the same; and the physical cable providers are even more expensive -- at least I think so. We get Verizon internet, so I decided to see what their TV packages are, and even after going to their website, I honestly have no idea. It's just a garbled, busy mess. One reason I went with Sling is because they have each channel explicitly listed in their various packages and the cost is clearly stated. It seems like every provider would do that, but that is not the case at all. And Sling is still screwing me. They offer two standard packages (Orange and Blue) and one has ESPN (Orange) and the other one has FS1 and NFL Network and NFL Red Zone (Blue). So, I can't buy ESPN by itself, but I also can't buy it with the other sports channels I would want. Well, I could. I could buy their combo package (Orange and Blue), but then I'd be up near the $85 per month price point like I would with any of the other providers. It's a real racket.
What I should do is just eschew live sports altogether. It wouldn't be total unheard of -- I pretty much did this all throughout college. I just did math all the time and was pretty happy (not many dates, though). I've actually thought about doing this again -- not math necessarily but something else. Like, what if every time I got the urge to watch sports, I read instead, or watched a movie. What if I just gave up watching sports altogether? It sounds good in theory, but in practice I don't think it would work. The Seahawks would be playing the 49ers on Monday Night Football, and I would be sitting there trying to read, wondering what's happening in the game. Then I would pull out my phone and follow the play-by-play transcript, which is worse. I mean, if you're going to waste three hours of your life watching a game, at least you can watch the game, right? It's much more pathetic to waste it watching a little football icon move across a graphic of a field, while you wait for the latest text update. Play under review?! What do you mean? What's going on?
Until next time...
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