In a previous post, I went through a list of all the terrible things we've discovered since ditching satellite TV for plain ol' over-the-air broadcasts. But if you're thinking about doing the same thing, I want you to know that it's not all despair and stinging regret (although we haven't been through a football season yet; I'm pretty sure football season will be all stinging regret). No, since ditching the dish, we've learned a lot of positive things too:
1) Not sending 80 bucks a month to DirecTV feels awesome. I recommend everybody try this. It feels so good, that I'm starting to think we were never really getting $80 worth of value out of that transaction.
2) We're not as out-of-the-loop as I feared we would be, thanks to this invention called "the Internet." I have realized that I was getting 90% of my news online anyway. And when I say "news," I mean sports scores, libertarian rants, and videos of robots playing tennis. It's all the news I need anyway, and the Internet has always been the superior means for delivering that stuff.
3) There's nothing on, but there was nothing on before either. Being disappointed that there's nothing on 6 channels feels exactly like being disappointed that there's nothing on 400 channels. So that's a wash.
4) There are only two things that I really miss: SportsCenter and House Hunters. Our TV was tuned to one of these shows probably around half the time it was on. The rest of the time it was on The Food Network, and my wife puts up a strong front, but sometimes I hear her sitting on the floor in the kitchen, slowly rocking back and forth, clutching a Bobby Flay cookbook to her chest, weeping softly.
However, we're both still convinced that we did the right thing by dropping satellite, which is better than I thought we'd be doing after five months. We'll probably return to some cable/dish package at some point in the future, but now that we've proven to ourselves that it's a luxury and not a necessity, we'll do it on our own terms.
We live in the UK, where in order to watch any television at all (even satellite or cable) you have to pay a license fee to the BBC who use it to spout anti-American, anti-Israel, pro-homosexual and generally anti-Christian bile across all its channels. About five years ago we decided we'd had enough and decided to stop paying our license fee and so, in effect, give up television altogether.
ReplyDeleteWe really expected to miss it, but in fact we haven't at all. I very occasionally watch Top Gear on the internet (which is allowed). My daughter watches DVDs and some other programmes also on the internet. Apart from that we have way more time than we otherwise would, and it really feels good not to be subsidising the BBC!
Thanks for that validation of the no-cable lifestyle. I can never get too much of it. And thanks for classing up the blog with that British spelling of "programmes"!
ReplyDeleteI'm just sorry we live in a world where you have to clarify that the BBC allows you to watch Top Gear on the internet.
We've never had cable and never really wanted to, but we do have Netflix to stream some movies and TV shows. It's very inexpensive, and there is a great deal of very nice children's programming that our grandchildren like when they come to visit!
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