Goodbye Cable, Welcome Back, Broadcast TV

Описание: For the first 31 years of my life, broadcast TV and antennas were the way TV came into the house. 13 channels, VHF and UHF. "I Love Lucy". "Ed Sullivan". "All in the Family". "Laugh-In". "Bewitched". "The Rockford Files". "Fame". It was an escape into another world, and above all, it was FREE. All was right with the world.

Then, cable came along in the form of Chicago Cable TV, with its siren song, sold to us by a young salesman who dressed and smelled like he had just come from mowing the lawn. (Literally; he had. His sneakers had green stains on the soles.)

ESPN. MTV. A&E. TBS. CNN. If those initials weren't appearing regularly on your TV screen, you were out of touch. An old fogie. A luddite. I looked down on people who clung to their rabbit ears and didn't have another wire besides the electric and phone snaking into their homes. But they knew.

I, on the other hand, was clueless. Even as my cable company jacked up the rates year after year after year after year after year, as though they were providing more and better service rather than piping the same shows through the same coaxial they ran through my closet and into my living room in 1987. By January of 2013, I was paying almost 15% more for basic cable than I did in January the year before, and almost as much as I was paying five years earlier for Digital Preferred with HBO and Showtime. It was time to pull the plug.

On Valentine's Day 2013, I made the move. Of course, the same company that treated me like day-old bread all those years suddenly was offering me discount deals they previously told me didn't exist. But they had their chance, and they blew it. I never want to pay to watch TV again, not to Netflix, not to Hulu Plus, not to ANYONE. I installed a digital/analog converter box and a set of rabbit-ear antennas. Watching TV is, once again, FREE.

There are 49 channels on broadcast TV now, but it doesn't matter. Except for the 5:30pm and 10:00pm news, I am giving up TV for Lent, and possibly beyond. Instead of watching, I'd rather be doing.