We are a house of hockey watchers, which is the main reason cable survived as long as it did here. Giving up the live games felt like the one thing streaming could not replace, so the expensive package stayed on autopay through years of otherwise ruthless budgeting. What changed was not a deal or a promotion. It was simply doing the math on a quiet Sunday. The package cost more per month than every other subscription in the house combined, and it existed almost entirely to deliver a handful of games and channels we could name on one hand. So we ran an experiment. We kept the streaming apps we already used for everything on-demand, and for the live channels we tried a service like iptv canada on the main television for a couple of weeks. It handled the games without the freezing I had been warned about, and it cost a fraction of the cable bill. After the trial we cancelled the package and never looked back. The lesson for anyone in a similar spot is to test the replacement before you cut the original, so there is never a weekend where the house has nothing to watch and everyone blames you.