by Chris Gautreau

Created on: February 06, 2011

How many times a week, or even each day, have you caught yourself threatening to rid your home of cable TV because there’s nothing on?

Well, my family did it. We’ve been cable-free with only Internet service for nearly two years, now. The sun still comes up every day. Nobody went stark-raving mad. And we watch nearly everything we want at a fraction of the cost.

Admittedly, “nearly” can be a big qualifier. I still haven’t figured what to do about Monday Night Football, and it’s tough not watching The Daily Show live every night. But the Internet is now a big, giant DVR. If it’s online anyway, why pay for TV again and in a much more expensive form?

Instead of shelling out nearly $200 a month for digital cable, we pay $30 for high-speed cable Internet and $10 for the all-you-can-stream version of Netflix. (Brief disclosure: My wife gets a small break on the cable bill through her employer.) We snag local stations with a digital antenna and in startingly clear high def.

It’s true that cable-less TV can be a drag. My father-in-law quipped that college bowl games on ESPN360 were like watching stop-motion animation. Bad weather can affect antenna reception, and Netflix’s network congestion is the frequent subject of debate. But so far, the savings have outweighed any inconvenience.

We’d talked about it for years, but my wife and I finally pulled the trigger on cable in mid-2009 as a cost-saving measure after I got laid off. I admit the first few weeks were akin to a midnight power outage. No TV was downright unsettling.

But we’ve compiled a list of free-TV websites, and there are lots of them. Our kids found their precious Disney shows. I found Family Guy on hulu.com, and my wife never missed a CSI episode, thanks to the CBS site. That fall, I delighted in discovering just how many college football games ESPN carries live online.

About a month after the layoff, I found a job with a great company. And despite our kids’ puppy dog-face appeal for cable’s return, my wife are pressing on. We exert much more control over viewing habits, especially our own, because there isn’t much live TV we can’t live without.

As a reporter who covered the media industry, I listened to executives prattle on about all the choices cable viewers enjoy. While cable providers have come a long way with the video-on-demand buffet, the meat and potatoes of cable-network schedules are still reruns and infomercials.

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