Life is full of big decisions. Who should be the President of the United States? That’s one.
Life is also full of little decisions and we just made one of those. We cut loose from cable TV.
World changing? No, but we’ve improved our personal lives greatly by dumping Foxtel cable’s most basic plan that was costing us more than $55 a month and signing up for a steady supply of movies and American TV show reruns at a cost of only $20 a month.
Foxtel was frustrating in the extreme. Nearly every time we chose something from the schedule of programs in the Foxtel menu, we got a message saying, in effect, “Sorry, cheapskate. You have to pay more for this or be content with watching a re-run of ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ for the third time.”
Quickflix is, as Aussies say, brilliant.
That means very, very good, which fits our experience of this company so far. I have no financial interest in Quickflix; I just like to give praise where praise is due.
We chose and ranked in order of preference 20 movies or TV show collections we’d like to see. Quickflix folk mailed us DVDs of our top two choices with postage paid return envelopes and, as soon as we’ve mailed back one, they send us another.
They claim to have 23,000 choices from which we can continue to top up our list, including video games, new releases, classics, documentaries, and collections of various kinds. If you want a half dozen DVDs in your hands at a time you can have them for a higher monthly fee, and if you’re happy with one at a time, you can cut your cost to $10 a month.
This is an Aussie company founded in 2003, but I see ads for companies in the US and elsewhere that may well be using the same model. If so, I wouldn’t want to be holding stock in video rental store companies or cable companies like Foxtel.
Steve Jobs and Apple are promoting an on-line movie rental system, also, but I understand that customers have only 24 hours to watch what they’ve ordered and downloaded. Quickflix has no deadlines for returning DVDs. Each of our movie choices provides us with two nights of entertainment and if we have to postpone the last half of one, no worries.
Of course, I won’t be watching the World Series or the Superbowl and I’ll have to wrangle an invitation to a friend’s place when the election results start coming in next November, but meanwhile, free-to-air TV plus Quickflix has produced a big improvement at our house.
Thanks to this change we’ve made, we have already seen several movies and a number of episodes of “Allie McBeal,” a wacky and well-written sitcom that began in 1997 with no attention from us. Lots of movies released in the last decade are new to our eyes, so Quickflix hasn’t had to disappoint us yet by saying, as Foxtel did regularly, sorry, not available.
Dinner, the Australian Broadcasting Company’s (ABC’s) “7:30 Report” of the news, an hour or so of a movie or TV show most people saw long ago, and then reading in bed until sleep sets in. A perfect night for us, wild and crazy people that we are.
One of my brothers, Mike, has simplified his life even more. He’s stopped watching TV entirely and reads omnivorously instead.
Maybe we’ll get to that stage of cultural maturity eventually, but for now, we’re happy with our little decision to drop Foxtel. I wish I could have such a direct and immediate effect on bigger decisions, including the occupancy of the White House.
I’m pretty sure I could save all of us some money with that one while making major improvements in our lives, too.
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