No cable. Which in my apartment means NBC and PBS are the only things I get without too much snow.
So I signed up for Netflix, and have thus far been quite content. The TV is on only to pop in DVDs.
I dropped cable the last time they raised their prices. It was just no longer worth it. Back to good ol’ rabbit ears for me. The vast majority of the time, I just have it on for background noise while I futz on my computer (I DO still have cable internet, which is certainly worth it). I figured I could take the money I spent on cable every month and use it to buy DVDs, and still have more than enough to watch when I want to.
You’re in the same town as me (I think). Why didja lose the other channels? (Or did you get rid of your TV altogether?)
I have “basic cable” (12.00 a month, local channels) in order to get any sort of TV reception at all. I have about 12 channels (including the big 4 and Discovery).
The cable company is constantly trying to offer me “deals” to get more channels. The last one went something like this:
Representative: “Join up and only pay 20 bucks a month for 3 months for blah blah number of channels” (no mention of the regular price which would revert after the three months were up)
Me: “No, thanks, I already watch too much TV and I’m not interested.”
Completely bewildered representative “But, how can you pass up this incredible offer?”
Me: “Um, because it would still cost me 60 bucks to participate?”
I mean, I probably would have been tempted if it had been FREE for 3 months 
I have netflix as well. Netflix has let me get caught up on my favorite cable series: The Shield, 6 Feet Under, The Sopranos, etc. It is weird to be constantly having to tell co-workers, “No, I didn’t see this or that, I don’t have cable.”
No cable. Never had it. I’ve made do with broadcast TV (or none at all) since moving to Atlanta in 1986. For a while, the only TV I had was a 9" B/W box from about 1978. Then a friend gave me a old 20" color set with no sound, so I’d turn them both on on the rare occasions when I watched something. I was fortunate in that most Braves games were on WTBS, which is still a broadcast station here in Atlanta, so I could get my baseball fix. It hardly seemed worthwhile to get cable to hook up to such crappy TVs. Then there was a fire in my building and I had to move out of the apartment and move in with my fiancee. On one of my trips back to pick stuff up, I had to laugh on finding that someone had climbed into a window six feet off the ground, broken into my apartment, and taken two barely functional TVs and a bunch of other worthless electronics, which they had to schlep up a steep embankment after getting it out of the window. Lot of work for not much profit. At that point, I moved in with my fiancee (now wife).
In her roommate days, my wife did have cable, but then she moved to Taiwan for a year, and since she didn’t speak or understand Chinese, she got out of the habit of watching TV. When she moved back to the States, she decided not to buy a TV. As an elementary teacher, she got a huge kick out of telling her kids that she didn’t have a TV whenever they asked if she’d seen something – it just blew their minds (particularly kids in this affluent district, who probably had multiple TVs in each room of the house). At the end of the year, the kids from all of her classes kicked in $5 or so apiece and got her a 13" color TV as an end-of-the year present. That was in 1993, and that remained the only TV set in our home from 1995 when I moved in with her until sometime this past spring, when I put a TV tuner card into my PC upstairs to be able to watch Braves games when the kids are watching something else downstairs. Then in August of this year, I bought a 9" AC/DC TV/VCR combo to keep the kids amused on weeklong car trip to Arkansas and back. We still don’t have cable or satellite, and have no plans to change that. Aside from all the other considerations about what our kids are watching, the effective minimum price for monthly cable service here is $50-$60. That’s $600-$720/year. Conservatively, then, over the last ten years, that’s $6000-$7200 that we haven’t given to the cable company or a satellite provider. In all honesty, I don’t think I’d trade that $7000 for any amount of TV programming over those ten years. We rarely watch at night, and with three small kids running around I don’t know when we’d ever find the time – I’m generally up until 2 am as it is doing the stuff there’s no time for when the younguns are awake.
I kicked my digital cable habit this summer. Instead of 200 channels for $60 US monthly, I now have about 15 channels for $11.41. It was a monetary decision, and frankly I didnt miss all those channels I never watched anyway.
That is, until Thanksgiving week when I contracted pneumonia and for 11 days I was couch-ridden. Boy Howdy do those 15 channels get boring quick from the 20 hours straight of viewing every day (not much sleep because of the horrible pain that came if I didnt remain sitting upright). Thankfully my DVD player gave me SOME respite.
Proud to say, I haven’t had cable ever in my whole life, with one exception (for 8 months a roommmate subscribed, what could I do?). I don’t even hook my TV up to an antenna. I only use it to watch movies from a VCR or DVD player. On the rare occasion that there’s something I want to watch, I have to either borrow the roommate’s rabbit ears or go to a friends house. It turns TV into a social event! Glad to see others who share my feelings about TV. What a waste of time.
Especially the commercials! They drive me insane! If I had to watch the same crappy commercials over and over again night after night, I’d be for sure homicidal by now. How can people stand it?
I’ve had cable since I was 12, and that’s only because that’s as soon as it was offered in my parents’ neighborhood. I have friends that have every package offered and spend well beyond $100 per month. I’m not nearly that bad, I actually just cut back on the tv selections when I installed internet service. The kids like Noggin (commercial free!) and I like Learning Channel, discovery and History Channel.
I also read the paper, listen to NPR and novels as well. Probably not as much as you folks without TV, but enough for me. You all just need to schedule your time better. 
Wow, I’m surprised so many other people here go without. I was raised until the age of 12 without a TV in the house, and looking back, I think I really lost something once we got a set. I never seemed to ride my bike. read as many books, or even just go outsoide as much once we got a TV.
Having a set to watch movies and just a few broadcast channels seems like a decent compromise.
I haven’t had anything but rabbit ears for 10 years or so. The idea of paying for TV galls me. Any cable shows I wanna watch I get from Netflix on DVD.
Also, it makes a night in a hotel a little more fun 'cause I get to see all these strange, new channels!
We moved to a new town about 7 years ago and made a list of stuff to be set up with the new apartment – electric, parking fees, phone etc. Just never got around to calling the cable guy for a few weeks and then said, “Let’s try without for awhile”. Still have a tv and VCR (you may recall these, they eat plastic rectangles and show pretty pictures). Also, on Sept 11 2001 we bought rabbit ears at the local Radio Hack, since our TV had NO ambient capability. Seeing the images didn’t really help it make much more sense, though.
So with antenna we get CBS, CTV, CBC, TVOntario and sometimes PBS if the planets are properly aligned. I waste enough time watching these…it’s just as well we don’t have any more. Interestingly my 2 year old has ZERO interest in video images – friends keep giving us Wiggles and Dora tapes, and she watches about 30 sec worth and gets up to go play with something. ([sub]Note to reactive parents: this does not make my child any better or worse than yours, it’s just an observation[/sub]).
We read a lot, and have lots of hobbies, and (perhaps unfortunately) spend a Christly amount of time on the Net. I’m pushing for DSL in the new year, because “honey, it will make our surfing so efficient, we’ll spend less time in front of the computer!”
I’ve never had cable or a dish. We only get the local channels here in the DFW area. Our kids think we are primitive and have had either cable or a dish of their own since they left home.
My wife watches mostly PBS or videos. Our set is so old it doesn’t have a DVD connection but she doesn’t want to get a new one.
While she is watching TV I am usually in another room reading or on the computer. I very rarely watch anything and would just as soon not have a TV.
My husband and I have gone several years at a time without cable (which meant no TV at all for us) and loved it. We still rented movies, but no TV. Even now that we have it again, I find I very rarely watch it and either listen to the radio or enjoy silence. I didn’t grow up watching it, though, so that could be a big part of not really needing it.
No TV at all here–no time and better things to do with the money. The occasional dvd on the computer is it. Partly this is because I really don’t have access to a TV; if I did it would be different. But also, as it is my life rotates between work and sleep. sleeeeeeppp…
Man, ain’t that the truth. When I’m traveling for work, I often find myself staying up way too late at night flipping around the channels or watching whatever crappy movies are on HBO. TV is sort of seductive, and since I don’t watch much at home, I don’t have much resistance built up, so I really get sucked in when I have decent picture quality and more than a half-dozen choices of things to watch.
When I was first going to college about 3 years ago, I moved in with a roommate that had given up cable when he was in college. He’d since graduated and offered to get cable if I wanted it. I resisted the urge to say yes because I was working full time and needed every spare moment to study. So, I went through about 2 weeks of “withdrawl” but once that was over I haven’t missed it much.
I’ve since graduated and I don’t have the desire to run out and get cable or even rabbit-ears. I enjoy all the time not watching TV has freed up for me. My fiance is perfectly happy without it as well. We have a TV and DVD player that we use to watch movies and any TV shows that we used to like to watch that have come out on DVD. I’d rather watch 2 or 3 episodes of Buffy at a time anyway! 
Four years ago I moved down the hall in my apartment building. I called Cox up, and offered to keep my service if they transferred it down the hall for free.
“But sir, it will still require a visit to your home to transfer your service. We have to charge you for that service call.”
“Here is a deal.” I offered, “You can send the guy over for the service call either way, to pick up the cable box, and get nothing, or to switch one cable in the basement, and get my regular monthly check for a couple of years. Your choice.”
“I’m sorry sir, we cannot do free service calls.”
“OK, you just lost a customer.”
Haven’t had it since. Don’t miss it.
But I do still have my son’s old TV, and I do still watch two or three programs a week. The holidays may have broken that habit, though. We’ll see. When the TV finally buys it, I will go back to not having one. But, the roommates both have them, so I will still be exposed some.
Tris