Does anyone not have a television and/or cable?

[Anonymous]

The last time I had cable was when I was 18, before I went to college. We use the good ol' rabbit ears and recently "upgrated" to a few more channels by buying the digital converter box. Although I do enjoy TV, I'm too cheap to pay for cable!

[Anonymous]

We did without cable for many years. We do have it now, mostly because my rabidly minimalist aesthetic won't permit rabbit ears, but there's not a lot of tv-watching in our house. Most of the time, we probably don't get our money's worth. Good for you for doing your own thing.

Here's a funny: I discussed this with a tv-less friend a few years ago. She said she had one guest ask, "What do you point your furniture at?" The answer, of course, was a lovely Victorian fireplace.

[Anonymous]

We've never had cable but have 2 new LCD digital mega TVs which are hooked to rabbit ears (a pretty sophisticated one but it only cost about $100) in the attic. We get great reception on all the network channels plus all the extras (like the 4 channels of WETA, etc). There is some map of the stations available on line that helped us to position our antena to maximize reception. (sorry DH did it so I don't have the details) We figured the years without cable paid for the 60 inch TV.

[Anonymous]

I would love to ditch the TV completely. It is such a time suck. We've talked about doing this, especially now that we have a one year old. We could just watch an occasional movie on the laptop.

[Anonymous]

I would kill everyone in my house and myself without TV and 400 useless channels.

[Anonymous]

We got rid of our TV when DC started screaming whenever we turned it off. The peace and quiet in our home has been fantastic, and DH does not turn on the TV every night and get glued to some dumb program or other.

We watch shows we like on the the internet -- Hulu has lots of them, and we don't have to schedule viewing.

DVD player for kids, or computer, and that works fine. I'm so glad we got rid of TV. One of the best things we ever did.

PBS shows may be in the internet -- or will be soon. Does anyone know?

[Anonymous]

We've never had cable either and also hate the concept of paying to watch ads on TV. Cable might have made sense back when it first came out and was ad-free, but now it has as many, if not more, ads than free broadcast- what a scam! Anyway, we have an analog TV hooked to a rooftop antenna and get okay reception on the major channels, and use Netflix for movies and cable shows we like.

Instead of the basic digital converter box, I just ordered a DVR/digital receiver: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0013WM0BQ/ref=ord_cart_shr?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance This will replace our DVD player and VCR as well. Basically it will be like Tivo without the monthly fee. But after reading this thread I wonder if we will get fewer broadcast channels than we do now. Anyone else have this setup?

[Anonymous]

If you have cable internet access you have cable tv. But the cable co won't tell you that or encourage it.

All you need is a cable splitter. Cheap little thing you plug the cable wire into instead of plugging it directly into your router. Then you get a cable to run from the splitter to your router, and another to run from the splitter to your tv.

Won't give you any of the premium channels, but I get all the channels I would actually watch on any regular basis that way.

[Anonymous]

We don't watch TV at all. We don't have cable. We can watch anything significant, like a political event, on the Internet. We use Netflix to watch the occasional DVD, and we own a few good kids' DVDs for parental sanity!