the Price of Basic Cable with Premium Channels

The price given is for one month's worth of cable television service along with the Digital tier of channels and one tier of premium movie channels, featuring a dozen movie channels (6 in the Eastern Time Zone and the same 6 in a Western Time Zone, so the movies are shifted back three hours from the East Coast.) and access to the movie network's On Demand digital playback of selected movies and recorded shows.

The quality of the digital service for the money that I'm paying is somewhat spotty, as is the case with much of the cable service in this region of the country. The channel selection itself is great, as I am able to watch over 150 channels of programming in addition to the premium movie channels. Overall, the quality of the programming is wonderful. However, the cable company in this area can be slow to react to service issues or outages, and can be very slow in getting new customers activated with higher level plans due to the rapid growth. (For my installation, nearly two weeks worth of time passed between the time I contacted the company to activate the service and the first available time that they could come to my property and install the service.)

If you are looking to purchase premium cable service from your local provider, be familiar with the services that they offer, namely the different packages, and ensure that you can get the channels that you would like to watch as cheaply as possible. Many times, certain channels can only be purchased in some packages, so know how the tiers break down. In addition, make sure that you as a consumer are going to use the service enough to warrant spending the extra for the premium packages. Lastly, make sure that you don't let the cable company rope you into purchasing services you don't need. I almost paid an extra ten dollars a month for a foreign language channel package because the cable company's call representative didn't communicate that it was extra to me. Be on guard when dealing with cable companies, especially when purchasing premium packages.