When I was a kid, my sister used to babysit for a family that didn’t have a TV in their livingroom. The parents kept the TV in a closet, and they brought it out with a DVD player periodically, and let the kids watch pre-approved shows. It boggled my mind how those kids survived. Now I know. I don’t remember *exactly* when my wife and I ‘cut the cord’, but it was at least a year ago, probably two. It has definitely been one of the best decisions we’ve made, and not entirely due to the financial benefits. If you don’t know, ‘cord-cutters’ are people who do not currently subscribe to cable TV. That’s right, we don’t have TV.
It was probably alot easier for us because we also lived without an actual TV in our house for nearly two years. It wasn’t a deliberate move, we just never really replaced our monstrous tube TV when it died. It was actually really liberating. For starters, our livingroom furniture faced……itself, instead of an ominous black box on the wall. When we had people over, we could sit in the room and actually have normal conversations without having to move a chair or two to face each other. It was splendid. We also went back to doing more enlightening things, such as reading and listening to music, both of which we still do to this day.
In any case, when we cancelled the TV portion of our AT&T Uverse account, we saved nearly $90/month. That’s just under $1,200 per year, which, ironically, is enough to buy quite a nice TV. We do still watch TV – we have an Xbox 360, and we watch stuff on Netflix and Hulu Plus. Together that costs us $20/month, plus the annual Xbox LIVE membership, which I got online for $40. Phenomenal, and I can play video games sometimes, too. We also have a Roku box that we bought for the spare room but ended up moving to the livingroom. That little box is $99 and has no annual membership like the Xbox does. Brilliant.
To be honest, I can’t fathom why people still pay for cable TV. It’s seriously baffling. Which puts me squarely in the 33% of a recent study that asked ‘cord-cutters’ if they would ever consider ‘going back’ to cable.
Have you ‘cut the cord’? Did you do it mainly for financial reasons, or was it something else?
Ricky Cadden 
We have not cut the cord bc we have five small kids to occupy while mommy needs a few minutes to herself! Also, we live in the country and Hulu and Netflix takes forever to load and buffers a million times! We do however pay for tons of crap channels we don’t watch, but without dish, we get no channels! Wish we could only pay for Disney, kera, and westerns cause that’s all we watch!! Ricky, if you give us some kind of technical solution to make Netflix and Hulu work for us, we will gladly join your cult…”the cord cutters”!!! Love you! And that family only watched baseball games and I had to mute commercials! Great family though! Eight kids in one room!
Sports. Unfortunately there’s not a legal way to get major league live sporting events without cable. Yes, broadcast gives some, but there’s a significant amount tied to ESPN and the regional sports networks. Does ESPN3 work on your XBox without a tv sub?
You can make a ton of money if you solve the live event problem in a way that makes viewers and advertisers happy.
Agreed. Nothing like live American football in HD on a nice big screen!
I’ve spent most of my adult life without cable and lately, I don’t even own a television. In the last five months since I’ve lived in San Francisco, I’ve spent two months with one in the house and the only way I can put it is that I felt like I was….slowing down.
I like the simplicity of television-on-demand and having not to hassle with hooking up yet another service.
If only I could get my wife to give up watching “America’s Dumbest”…