A Year Without Cable TV - Page 4

150/mo isn't worth it to watch one game, even $50 isn't.

To you maybe it isn't. To me it is because just about every night there's a game (or two) on my TV, be it Hockey, Basketball or Soccer. When Baseball and Nascar starts those will be on full time as well.

I'd like to say I had that much free time.

Interesting. I was under the impression that the networks got smart and encrypted everything. I used to enjoy in the late 80's early 90's watching ANYTHING you wanted on satellite for free including playboy, which was heaven for a teenage boy . I also used to love "wild feeds" watching Dan Rather get ready for the news practicing his lines and talking to people.

I reside about halfway between two major markets, Oklahoma City, OK and Wichita Falls, TX. With my antenna, I am receiving ABC, AntTV, CBS, CW, DayStar, FOX, ION, LWN, MyNet, NBC, PBS, Qubo, Telemundo, ThisTV, TuffTV, UniVision, two music video channels, and a couple of local independents. Most of these are in as good High Definition as what I was getting from the satellite. I must honestly say that apart from almost a hundred dollars a month in fees, the only thing I've really missed by disconnecting was a couple of ball games.

The only problem I've encountered is KTBO in Oklahoma City and KJTL in Wichita Falls both broadcast over channel 15 and being halfway between them, I get neither one as my set can't discern whether to create virtual 14 (TBN from OKC) or virtual 18 (FOX from WFT).

But if one is poor and lower income and struggling then I understand that you gotta do what you gotta do.

You see this sometimes gets my back up. I can easily afford cable/satellite service. Sometimes money and being able to afford a service isn't the point. I just can never find enough on to justify the expense. For me, OTA + Netflix is the best bang for the buck. I am just over with the concept of paying "The Man" for absolute crap.

Kryspy

My kids got me a Samsung brand BlueRay player for Christmas. It not only plays discs but also connects wirelessly to the internet. There are a multitude of apps (some already installed) including HULU Plus and NETFLIX. Their subscriptions are only $8 monthly and between the two of them you can find just about every episode of every TV series you may have missed or just want to watch again as well as a decent array of movies.

BlueRay players, Game Consoles, and most new TVs come with this built in.

And see, it works for you too. Some folks can happily get by without cable. For me, I find plenty on, including all of the sports I like. The only downside, and it is a huge one for me, is my hubby is an either/or kind of guy. If I got rid of cable the internet would go with it, non-negotiable. And I love my internet, so it all stays.

That is the way I look at it too. I rather spend money on DVDs I want to watch for my ala-carte programming and watch OTA HD for free. The only thing I miss is Monday Night football but thanks to OTA I watch 24 hours of football in HD on the weekends.

With my antenna, I am receiving ABC, CBS, DayStar, FOX, MyNetwork TV, NBC, PBS, MeTV, TBN, Bounce TV, ThisTV, TuffTV, and My Family TV.

If had a $150 a month pay TV bill coming in I would be doing this.

Once again... if money is tight, no need to turn to cable even for internet service. We get DSL service for $19/month, without adding home phone service. It isn't as fast as cable, but then again it does what we need fast enough and our house includes 2 network laptops and an Xbox live bandwidth eater.

For DVDs, there's Redbox. Get a couple of free rentals a month and the rest of the time it costs $1.20. If we can't watch a DVD on the night of the free rental, we have a solution for that too which costs us an additional 40 cents.

For those weeks when the Flyers are in the playoffs, usually can catch the games on NBC or we call up some PA friends and go out for a few beers. Still alot less than PPV and a monthly cable bill.
Same thing for our alma mater football/basketball games. When the game is big, we meet up with our local alumni assoc to watch it somewhere else.
Not having cable has actually contributed to our being more outgoing social people in our old age.

All Texans games are broadcast on local HDTV, by NFL mandate, even if their game is showing nationally on the NFL network or ESPN. And local HDTV shows way more Astros and Rockets games than I care to watch each year.

Finally, with 2 kids in high school, a lot of our time is spent at their games and competitions instead of sitting in front of our HDTVs. We much prefer the Real Friday Night Lights to the one on TV(when it was on TV).

All in all, NOT having cable TV has probably enriched our lives.....

Love cable and not cutting the cord unless I absolutely have to due to budget concerns. I pay 90 a month for RCN in delaware county PA. For that 90 I get most of the channels I wanted, tivo box, cable modem and router included, and my internet speed is 40Mbps which kicks the crap out of DSL (3Mbps) and Comcasts basic highspeed internet (15Mbps).

It's just easier, everything usually just works. Yes I can do more if I build a HTPC, but nothing irritates me faster than when something goes wrong and I have to troubleshoot it for a few days. I spend too much time at work doing work stuff to have to go home and put in more work. For as much time as I spend watching tv, and being online 90bucks seems to be a good value for me.

Wow, that's a great price for all of that. We pay Comcast around $65/mo for 15Mbps and limited basic cable. We own the modem and router, and use an HTPC for DVR duties.

I'd dump cable, but that would jack the internet up to $60/mo, so I'm basically paying $60/yr to avoid putting up an antenna. Initially we were worried that we'd miss watching the upper channels, but we found that we really only watched the local networks anyway. The other shows we watched were pure time wasters. Movies and Netflix streaming (mostly older TV shows) fills in the rest.

Yeah, I used to use Comcast too. Glad I switched...mainly for the internet speed. Too bad I may move into the city and RCN doesn't service that area so I may be stuck going back to Comcast eventually.

For all those with high cable bills, you need to call the cable company every time your introductory rate runs out. If you call and threaten to cancel they will keep giving you the introductory rate.

When I ordered the RCN service I called comcast to cancel. They asked me why, I said RCN is cheaper, they offered me their intro rate again and really tried to sell me on their service. I had already set up the appointment with RCN and the internet speed is faster so I said no thanks. But if you ask, they will generally keep giving you the intro rate. They actually told my friend who was going to cancel comcast to call back every 6 months to keep getting the rate he was getting.

Wondering what you guys do at home that requires such high bandwidth?

Gaming.

Netflix?, Hulu? at 1080p streaming requires a lot! of bandwith!
I rather let a few hours pass and then watch a show with my humble bandwith dsl.

I found 6mb DSL to be adequate for most streaming. 1080p streaming on YouTube wouldn't work unless I gave it some time to pre-load maybe 50%. 720p streaming would sometimes hiccup but was usually pretty good. Don't have Netflix, so can't comment on that.

Another consideration is bandwidth caps. Since I don't stream too much, I was never worried about hitting ATT's 150GB cap. I just switched to Comcast, which IIRC has a 250GB cap. The only reason for the switch was the wife working at home and needing a better connection and us getting fed up with ATT's customer service not knowing their head from their

I get the middle of three speeds of DSL our ISP provides. Depending on how many of the kids are home at a given time, I have anywhere from 1 to 6 devices feeding off it. My PC is wired into the router and all the rest are wireless. I can be streaming Hulu Plus in 720P on my 42 inch television while the kids are chatting and doing Facebook stuff and the DSL keeps up with it all.
I was on Directway satellite until it became HughesNet and they implemented a 100 megabyte limit on downloads before they would time you out and put you at the bottom of the heap for a day or two. DSL has met all my needs well.

Been without cable for 3 years and without a land line for 10 years.

Don't miss either. Use OTA, Hulu and Netflix. Too much junk out there anyway and with Texas' gorgeous weather, we're happier outside (and on the inside!).

Very simple, install it in the attic, provided that you have a high/steep rooftop.

+1. My choice isn't about money. We get plenty of entertainment with OTA/Netflix/Amazon (and better PQ and much better controls via WMC + Roku than any cableco DVR I've used) - and more incentive to spend time outside since everything is 'time-shifted' anyway.

We still have a landline - cheap VOIP service. Only person that ever calls it is the mother-in-law, and it routes her directly to voicemail. That's alone is worth way, way more than I pay for it.

Ditto. Saving the money is nice, but it's not the reason I did it.

I recently fired DirecTV and got a TiVo box for $20 a month. Goes down to $15 in a year. I got fed up with jacking around with a stupid computer for HD OTA and figured $15 was worth it for pain free DVR service. TiVo does Netflix and Hulu, although not as slick as AppleTV

Fired Comcast too and switched to CenturyLink DSL. Service is about the same as comcast.

All in all, happy with the switch and about $120 less hit to the monthly budget.

I've been without TV of any kind for a good six or seven years now. I don't even think about it anymore as something I am giving up. TV is a vast time suckage device really, not to mention a vast brain cell suckage device. I have a Netflix subscription to watch movies.

Good for you for going cold turkey. You have bigger cahunas than I do.
Cheers, Pete.

I still have cable but don'T really use it too much.

The cable channels that I used to like now show mostly reality show trash which I have no interest in. I put up an antenna and was surprised to find that I could receive 33 channels. Over the last 6 months I've discovered that we watch the antenna programs far more than the low quality mess that cable has transformed itself into. So I've decided to cut the cord too.

I never got into sports (when I was a kid, sporting events were mostly thought of programming that interrupted the shows that I really wanted to see; I remember so many times having the last clock minute or two of a basketball game running for half an hour, effectively canceling the show that I wanted to see), so that was never an issue for cable-cutting.

Basically, when I went to grad school in '05, I found myself without much free time, and that was the year that I stopped watching cable. I still *had* cable during that time as part of my apartment lease, but it didn't get much use. Once I got out, I tried watching cable again, and realized that I no longer had the patience to watch 9 minutes of commercials per 21 minutes of programming. The thought of paying $50 a month (or more) for that just seems silly.

I've never had a cable bill in my adult life, and I doubt that I ever will. Give me netflix and Blu-Rays. My TV days are long over.

Good Thread. Thought I'd toss in my 2 cents. We had the three pack, TV, Internet & phone with BH for ~$140/Mo. Around 2008 I slowly began to notice that I couldn't find anything to watch on the 100 channels we had. My favorite channels had deteriorated. History Channel had become the 24 hour "Hitler channel", Discovery had become the "Shark Attack" network, and the Science Channel had devolved into the "Earth is going to be destroyed by a giant comet channel". My wife agreed that there wasn't very much we wanted to watch any more that wasn't available OTA. When the economy tanked in 2008 we took the plunge and I dropped the TV service, saving us $60/Mo. We started with an old VCR, but soon after I set up an HTPC for recording OTA shows which works beautifully. I get two cities at VG to EX quality signal. Initial costs were about $1000 for antennas, rigging, boosters, PC, tuners and other misc. All paid for within 16 months. Since then we also dropped the IP phone service from BH for an different IP phone service. The new service is actually more expensive than the bundle of phone/internet from BH (new service $6 more a month), but it offers a whole lot more bang for the buck. BH phone service (at least at that time) had very few extras. We also use Netflix for a few cable TV shows that have popped up that we enjoy. With Netflix, our kids are getting to watch many of the shows that my wife and I grew up with that we know are not all sex/drugs/death like so much on even OTA TV now. We also like that if we do find a show we like on Netflix, whether a cable or an OTA production, we can watch an entire season instead of waiting for each episode. Oh, and I don't care about sports. It isn't for everybody, but we're very happy we made the switch.

Read an article on Boxee a while back that claims 87 of the top 100 shows are major networks, so free OTA. Obvioulsy, they are trying to sell BoxeeLive, so not sure of he source of accuracy of this stat.