Really want to give up my cable TV......

[Angrboda]

I just signed up for cable tv. It's expensive. I didn't count on the miscellaneous "fees and taxes," which are $20 extra. Oh well, I figure I'll keep it the year of the promotional discount and then dump it. All the signal towers for OTA television are in the northeast, and I live on the south side of a high rise apartment building. There's an antenna on the roof with wiring to the individual units, but it's as often as not misaligned, so reception is hit or miss. I'm somewhat nonplussed about Amazon and Netflix. Yes there is a lot of choices, but most of the content available is crap. That's why I prefer cable. You can get decent movies and the sports programming available with cable beats OTA hands down. If only it weren't so expensive.

[vorlon13]

There are some DVR devices made for OTA.

The Channel Master unit is hard for me to recommend, the tuner isn't particularly sensitive and the clunky channel scanning feature precludes use of the device with an antenna rotator.

TIVO has (had?) some units that worked OTA. I only ever encountered a couple of them. The second one in particular sticks in my recollection as an unhappy piece of technology. Tuner had issues with signals of differing strengths (unavoidable in my rural area, obviously) and the updating of the unit was painful. People who had it (and paid dearly for it) gave up in a few months and went to DirecTV.

There is another unit, better reviews, and I even have one. Just haven't had time to get it up and running.

[Seraphina]

Screw cable and satellite. I bought an antenna and a Roku a few years back and tried those for a month or two before deciding to cut off my satellite subscription. Best decision I've ever made with my household budget.
I get Sling and watch CNN, they also show live sports. There are loads of free channels on the Roku device. I don't know why anyone would pay for cable or satellite nowadays.

-Teresa

[I_am_not_mafia]

Haven't had a TV for years. I considered getting one when I lived in Germany but only to help me learn the language. I watch Netflix on my computer but only occasionally because there's too much American stuff on it. Generally we watch episodic programmes so we can have one episode every evening to relax before doing something more interesting. I certainly wouldn't ever watch anything that had as many adverts as found on American TV. I found that if you don't have a TV then you don't know what's on and therefore don't miss it. First I heard of Breaking Bad was everyone talking about the final episode at work, but as they were speaking in German there weren't any spoilers for me.