We have a 13" color set that for years was the only TV in our house (I now have a TV tuner card in my desktop PC, and we bought a portable TV/VCR combo for the kids to watch in the back of the van before a really long car trip last year). We’ve never had cable or satellite, so broadcast channels are all we get. Which is fine by us, since we almost never turn it on after I get home from work. The kids will sometimes watch PBS shows before school in the morning, or if they’re out of school for some reason, and they may watch Arthur or Zoom when they get home, but they’re as likely as my wife or I to turn it off if there’s nothing on they actually want to watch. I will say that having some external factors compelling you to give it up or cut back makes a big difference.
I got out of the TV watching habit back in seventh grade. My dad was working on finishing his college degree, and his desk was in the living room where our TV was. He had enough trouble with organic chem without having the tube on as well, so we were essentially banished to our rooms; my parents gave me a cheap compact stereo (turntable, AM/FM tuner, 8-track deck) for Christmas that year, and I basically went into my room and came out when I graduated from high school. I still watched stuff on weekends or late at night on occasion, but watching TV was no longer the default option for how to spend my evenings. In college, I don’t think we ever had a TV in the dorm room (couldn’t get cable and broadcast reception sucked). After college, I had no money to spend on a TV; I did inherit a 9" B/W box from my family, that I used to watch Braves games on TBS (a broadcast station here in Atlanta), but I certainly wasn’t going to pay for cable to hook up to that, and it hardly seemed worthwhile to get a VCR either.
My wife, on the other hand, was a TV junkie until she moved to Taiwan for a year. She and her roommate there had a TV, but since their Mandarin wasn’t very good, there weren’t many options for things to watch, so she got out of the habit. When she moved back to the states, she consciously decided not to buy a TV. She spent most of that year telling her fifth-grade students “No, I didn’t see that last night; I don’t have a TV,” which they found so unfathomable that her three classes chipped in about $5/each and bought her the 13" TV we still have as an end-of-the-year gift.
After we moved in together, we did get a VCR and rented movies occasionally, but we have such different tastes that we rarely could agree on things to rent, so we just continued not watching much. After the kids came along, we did have PBS on a lot of the day, and we’d get videos of cable shows they liked (Blues Clues, mainly) from the library. There were a few shows my wife made an effort to catch (West Wing, mainly), but since we rarely had the TV on at night, she’d forget and miss them as often as not. I still like to watch baseball games when I can, but since MLB has made the Braves cut back their broadcasts on TBS, I probably only see parts of one or two games a week, if that. There’s a DVD player in my computer, and my monitor’s bigger and sharper than the 13" TV we have, so I sometimes rent DVDs (I’ve even bought a handful) to watch, mainly when the family’s out of town. I do admit that I’ve been having covetous thoughts about a larger TV for the living room a lot over the last few years, but I also have to admit that there are lots of things we’d get more use out of to spend the money on.
Also, with three small kids (all under 7 years old), I honestly don’t know where other people with kids find the time to watch every night. By the time I get home from work, we have dinner and clean up, it’s usually 7:30 or so, meaning we have at most an hour before it’s time for the kids to be in bed, a lot of which is taken up with getting them baths, changing into pajamas, brushing teeth, reading stories to them, etc. The time after they’re asleep and before we go to bed is the only time during the day for my wife and I to catch up with each other and do any of the other stuff that needs doing – I usually stay up until 1:30 or 2 am catching up on e-mail, playing music, or doing other little projects, and still never get around to half the things I want to do. If I watched TV until 11 pm, I’d get even less done.
I have to admit, however, when I travel on business and am by myself in a hotel room with a TV with cable or satellite, I often end up just staring at the TV most of the night, staying up way too late flipping through the channels or watching whatever crappy movie’s on HBO. I think because I spend so little time doing it at home that my resistance to it is weaker, because I really do get sucked into it when it’s there, and find it tough to tear myself away.
So welcome to the world of the under-TVed. I think you’ll like it. I know we like having the $4200 we estimate we’ve saved over the seven years we’ve been in our house by not paying for cable during that time ($50/month x 84 months).
