Good bye cable TV

If you are within 25 miles or so of the tower, you can get VHF with a coat hanger. A lot depends on the receiver in the TV but most are pretty good. I am getting Ch11 30 miles away with one of those twin lead di-pole antennas you used to get in the bag with a new TV. The UHF works OK with the wire loop. (Samsung flat screen) My free gov'ment converter works on them too but the tuner in the Dish box and the TiVo not so much.

My 2 Cents wrote in news:o3bo66$cpa$ snipped-for-privacy@gioia.aioe.org:

That happened to me back in the mid-90s. Cable TV cost doubled. Dropped it and junked TV. Best decision I ever made. Now I read a lot and listen to local NPR station on the radio - lots of good news shows and music at night. Also satellite radio. Lots of good classical, jazz, and other music. I've got so I hate TV if I pass a demo in a store electronics dept. I listen to a few TV-audio only news channels on satellite a few minutes a day while I'm doing calisthenics - seems like more commercials than news on NBC, CNN, etc. Can't imagine how I ever watched TV in the past. Good riddance!

Cost of cable continues to rise and many are dropping the service. I did so about two years ago when I finally grew tired of those rising costs. I did erect a omni directional OVA antenna and receive over 65 channels, though, several are religious and kids channels, there are plenty of others for me but it ends up I don't watch TV as much anymore and saving $120 a month.

You can get a directional antenna on eBay for 30 dollars, that includes shipping.

That plus a digital descrambler, if you need one, will get you a lot of channels.

I dumped DirecTV almost 3 years ago. Can't get over the air, too far away so I bought a Roku which will get a ton of streaming stuff. Unfortunately, most of the free channels include commercials, some of the pay ones do to (Hulu+) so we subscribed to Netflix for $9.00/mo and Acorn for $6.00. I am content.

I dropped it 3 or 4 years ago. Wish I had done it earlier. The rabbit ears from Best Buy ($10.99) does just fine--about 26 reasonable stations. Same goes for the "land line" (which got replaced with a Trac phone). Of course, an even bigger one was cigarettes, $150-175/mo.

On 20 Dec 2016 17:52:14 GMT, KenK wrote in

Same here 30 years ago.

If we could get OTA we'd drop the satellite ... but we live down in The Holler and we're a hundred miles from the nearest broadcaster . We used to get 3 or 4 channels before they all went digital , now we get zip .

Many options depending on your wants and needs. I called and asked what I have to do to drop the service. Next thing I know I'm paying $40 a month less. Well worth the 10 minutes of my life to call.

I canceled my cable TV 25 years ago and threw the TV out altogether.

Best move I ever made.

If my bill averaged out to be $100 a month that would have been $30k

exactly what I paid for my house in 1979

Yup. I have a yearly ritual of calling Cox and getting a new discount for the following year. It varies but generally I get around 50 bucks a month off. Well worth the time IMO.

Keep this up and I'll be standing on a street corner holding a sign "will climb poles for food".

Per KenK:

When I was living in Hawaii, I went something like seven years without ever seeing a TV screen.

Then one day a Lum's Deli opened up near the University of Hawaii campus and I wandered in to scope it out.

On the wall behind the counter they had a TV.

I must've sat there for at least a half-hour - absolutely transfixed.

What people (including me now) don't realize is that TV is so stylized that it approaches Kabuki in it's own way... the characters on screen looked sooooo bizarre to me and they way they spoke was just as strange.

After I moved back to the mainland, I never got cable or satellite - always over-the-air TV. Every so many months, we *still* get some nice young person knocking at the door to tell us that we are the only household within x miles that doesn't have cable and wouldn't we like to get with the rest of the world.

I have a PC-based DVR and a NAS box. Between the DVR and a subscription to NetFlix's DVD service, I have more good, interesting stuff in the can that I could ever hope to watch..... maybe if I became a quadriplegic I could watch all of it... but right now there aren't enough free hours in the day to make much of a dent...