Consumer Reports had a article on this, and showed that with rising streaming prices, and the cost of just getting internet through “cable”, “cutting the cable” might not save much.
Many streaming services have low intro prices, they get quite a bit higher.
Can you get an antenna? You’re in Portland right? I’m in Hillsboro and get 55 over the air channels.
Yeah, most are junk but I get 2,6,8,10 and 12 just fine, that’s your local stuff. Sports outside the national networks is the problem.
My wife ALWAYS gets her Saints games on the computer, I don’t want to know how, but I tell her I’ll write to her in prison.
I’m a sports junkie. Last Saturday I probably watched all or part of a dozen college football games. Yesterday I watched all or part of six or seven NFL games. During the summer I watch at least one MLB game every day. During the winter months I’ll watch college basketball 4 or 5 days a week.
When I can get coverage like that without cable, I’ll consider cutting the cord. Until then, I’m damn happy where I’m at.
If you don’t need to watch shows right when they air, you can get Hulu for a couple of months and binge the shows that you like, then cancel it and get HBO and then Apple, etc. and then start all over again. Many of them will give you a free first month and then it’s $15 or so a month. The price doesn’t go up beyond that for nearly all services.
As many have already said, it’s the sports nuts that are more stuck with cable/satellite. Since I am not a sports nut, I may be out of date on that and there are good solutions. There are very few non-sports people whose viewing habits will require the cord to save money. Those companies are living on inertia.
One more thought. If you’re like me and there are two or three shows a year that you really love but don’t want the rest of the content on that channel, you can just buy the show. In my case, I’ll buy Better Call Saul for $19 rather than subscribe to AMC.
Yikes. I really like Apple, but the Apple TV is a rip-off. I’d strongly suggest returning it and getting a Roku ($20, as mentioned above). The $5/month fee is for Apple+, Apple’s streaming service (like Netflix or Hulu), and is optional. It’s also available via a Roku. So even if your wife is committed to the Apple ecosystem and only buys media on Apple, a Roku is going to give you access to it all.
The Blazers games used to always be on NBC Sports, but now are on Root TV. Both are only available through a cable subscription, far as I know. I’m pretty heartily sick of the Blazers at this point, and don’t really care if I watch them or not. We do like to watch the Thorns, who are normally available on Paramount through Roku, but their season is over. Other than that, I don’t watch sports at all. We have OPB Passport on Roku, so we can watch most PBS stuff there. I had to hack Hulu to death with a machete because I made the mistake of bundling it with Disney+. Problem is, you can’t unbundle it once you have it, so I had to kill the account and open a new one for Hulu only under my wife’s name. We spend a lot of money on TV, but it’s been our only entertainment for going on two years now.
That seems dubious. I think you’d have to subscribe to all of them for that to be the case. And I don’t think anyone does that. You have a couple dependable ones, and then you rotate out the others.
That is, unless you’re talking about the live TV services, but those are just cable with a different name. But, yeah, they get pricey.
I’m pretty happy with Youtube TV. I’m not sure its a bargain at $65/mo., but I get lousy reception with an antenna and it gives me all the local channels, plus ESPN and some other sports channels. Probably not six or seven NFL games yesterday, but at least four. And more basketball and hockey than I would ever care to watch.
You may be right, but as much as I detest messing w/ tech, it sure isn’t worth saving $140 to try to convince my wife to go in another direction. 
I absolutely get that. You’re not losing any features by doing so. Most everything the average consumer needs is available. For side cases (like The Roku Channel itself) you can AirPlay most of it.
And there’s some decent content on Apple+ - but know that once you burn through it, you can cancel the monthly and the device itself works just fine.
We don’t get over the air channels so we pay our cable company $20/month for all of our local channels plus discovery and TBS and a bunch of others. We’d have to pay even more if we wanted ESPN so I’ve learned to live without it. I also pay for mlb.tv between that and broadcast football all of my sports needs are met.
I guess technically we have espn+ but after two years of trying to find something worth watching we’ve deleted the app and I’d cancel the service if it wasn’t free with Disney+ and Hulu.
And I was basically ready to just dump all TV services and just borrow the occasional DVD from the library! 
Something about sending all that $ Comcast’s way just bothered me. Feels good to have finally done something about it.
You know how the consumer reporters are always telling you to call your cable company and ask them for a lower rate? I did that. I called Spectrum and quoted them the rate ATT was offering me. They fiddle around forawhile, and gave me a new rate for Internet. Then they told me they had moved me from a legacy Charter subscriber to a Spectrum subscriber, and that I should call back and ask for a lower Spectrum rate after the next billing cycle.
I did that and spent an hour and twelve minutes on the phone with the Spectrum rep. Most of that time I was on hold. At least I thought I was on hold. At one point I told my wife I felt like I was in that SNL skit about the guy trying to cancel cable. Suddenly the rep came back on the line and said, “There was a Saturday Night Live sketch?”
As the day wore on (“We’re working on getting you that best rate, Mr. Clark”) the rep would occasionally try to make small talk with me. At one point he noticed I was in Missouri. “I have family in Missouri.” “Really? What part?” “Uhh, Kansas. That’s part of Missouri, isn’t it?” “Do you mean Kansas City, or the state of Kansas?” He dropped that line of chatter.
I am convinced the idea was to wear me out and have me hang up in frustration. Fortunately, I have a secret weapon. I’m retired and called on a day when I had nothing on my schedule.
People keep telling me that I can save $150 by cutting the cord, but my high speed Internet and Cable TV bundle is $119/mo. And I do NOT have a barebones package. I do have only one TV.
To get to $300 I’d need to go up three levels and add three TVs with rented set top boxes for each.
Around Chicago, standard cable internet/TV via Comcast is up around $200 - not including premium channels. We had previously been able to get them to knock it down a bit from year to year - to $150 or so, but this time around they told us to pound sand. So we went down to internet only, which is around $100.
On the positive side, we watched TV yesterday evening and I was able to just pick up the remote and pretty quickly figure out how to watch what I wanted! Score one for the old fart!
Googles TV solution is Chromecast. We have two. We got rid of our DirecTV.
We dropped our land line about a year ago. It was real unreliable in the winter and just pissed us off. We just use cell phones. I put an external antenna on the roof that has a repeater inside.
Never have had cable or DSL or anything. Everything goes through our satellite dish. Actually we have two dishes. Starlink and Hughes.net. I work from home and I connect to work over the dishes. I’m keeping hughes as a back up.
So now my wife is having mild second thoughts re: the AppleTV. But I just said we should consider it sunk costs, and it isn’t worth $140 for me to even consider/discuss/research it any more.
She’s got it set up with the DVD player and a digital antenna, and connected to our Amazon and Netflix. Last night we watched a DVD from the library - and I was even able to figure out the remotes! Next step, have to figure out what all of those broadcast channels are, block the ones we’ll never watch (direct shopping/foreign language…), and see if there are listings so we can see what - if anything - we want to plan on watching. Not a big sports watcher, but looks as tho I will have the option IF I want to watch the Super Bowl or the Masters.
Just really feel good about the steps we’ve taken to update and pare down our tech, while tailoring it to our specific needs.
If you’re ever looking to upgrade your TV, I have a TCL 6-series. It pulls the listings for the over-the-air broadcasts, and if you plug in an SD-card, will give you 30 minutes of rewind/pause buffer (as long as you don’t change the channel).
Hulu has run a special the last few years over Black Friday weekend - 12 months of Hulu for only $2 a month. Each year, I re-up under a different email address and credit card (they check). They haven’t announced this year’s special yet, but it’s expected any day now, so keep an eye out. Otherwise, it’s about $6/month.
I think the only show on Hulu I watch is What We Do in the Shadows, and it’s great.