I’ve been without cable now for a couple of weeks, so I’m starting to see how it will shake out.

While the cable company didn’t do anything to market to me to try to keep me as a customer, either DirecTV Now was just having a sale at a good time or the time I looked up info about it while I was logged into my AT&T account triggered something because last week they sent me an offer to get the basic service for $10 a month for the first three months. This is the “cable” service that you stream online. Since I only really wanted it for three months, that was practically heaven-sent. It allowed me to watch the Olympics stuff that wasn’t on the broadcast network, it will allow me to watch the rest of the season of Once Upon a Time (since that’s a channel I can’t get with my antenna), and it will let me finish out the series of Star Wars Rebels and this season of The Magicians.

From my first week or so of using the service, I have to say that the live streaming works great. I forget I’m not watching regular TV. The only weird thing is that there are no channel numbers. The “what’s on now” grid just has the networks in alphabetical order, which takes some getting used to.

Their on demand service pretty much sucks, though. I’m not home when The Magicians is on, so I was counting on watching it on demand, but last time I checked, they were at least three episodes behind. I managed to watch Rebels live, but the new episode still hasn’t shown up. I’ll have to see how well they do with anything else. I did find a workaround for The Magicians because the DirecTV Now credentials let me unlock the SyFy app on Roku, so I’ve been able to watch episodes that way. I could probably do the same with the Disney app for Rebels.

Meanwhile, thanks to some recommendations, I checked out season one of The Good Place from the library, and then season two was available on demand. But getting that through DirecTV Now was really glitchy, lots of stops, starts, buffering, and then they put the ad breaks in the wrong places. It was like they got the feed out of sync. A character would be in mid-word and suddenly there are ads, then it would pick up the scene for another 20 or so seconds, and then there would be the regular ad break, but just with a network promo. I resorted to the NBC app instead, again unlocked using the DirecTV login (and what’s the deal with the broadcast networks, the ones you don’t need cable to watch, requiring cable subscriptions to stream their content? Are they actively trying to lose viewers? Because if you can’t keep up with their shows when you miss something, you tend to stop watching entirely.)

So, this isn’t quite a perfect replacement for cable, but for $10 a month it’ll do and I’ll be dropping it when this special runs out at the end of the TV season. With Amazon Prime and all the various free stuff on Roku, plus the streaming services from the library and the library’s DVD collection, I have more stuff to watch than I have time for, and the point of all this was to have more time to do other stuff. The difference is that I have to do more to get to something to watch, and that means no mindless “let’s see what’s on” channel surfing. I’m thinking of getting a longer coaxial cable and moving the antenna upstairs to see if that will help my reception. There’s a weird glitch that happens with the PBS station in certain weather conditions, where the picture freezes or pixilates when an airplane flies over, and I live between two major airports. I don’t know if the weather affects the signal or affects the flight path, which puts the planes in a place to affect the signal.

Now that the Olympics are over and I’m back to a more “normal” (for me) schedule, we’ll see how this affects my time management.