I'll agree here. The $50/month I'm saving by not having cable included isn't really going toward savings, and we could certainly afford it. It's just that it had a detrimental effect: we'd watch things that we weren't all that interested in, we'd sit through hours of commercials. My wife and I were generally annoyed with the whole experience, but because it was available and easy we were sucked into it.
We cancelled the cable and we are less annoyed. We spend an extra 15 minutes downloading what we want, and we spend less time as vegetables just passively accepting what's coming down the pipe. Less time spent watching commercials that annoy us. It's very much worth it. (Although I miss watching live sports in HD... but not enough to pay for it)
You can solve the live sports issue for the most part by getting free basic channels. You can do it in a lot of ways, one of an easy ones is get a $10 antenna. All local channels will be available to you for free, in HD. Then you can watch most sports:
- NFL: all football games with your local team, and a lot of others. You won't be able to watch Monday Night and Thursday Night football, but if it's your local team playing, they'll have that game on a free channel.
- MLB: depends on your market, but generally there should be at least one game a week on free channels. Plus, AL/NLCS and WS are on FOX.
- NBA: less available, but there's usually two games every Sunday or every two Sundays on ABC.
- NHL: usually one game a week on NBC.
Also, there's plenty of other live sports on free channels - golf, tennis, soccer, etc. For example, Olympics are going on right now and NBC has two hours of coverage every night.
I live in a town of about 100,000 people and as far as stations that have sports, I get ABC, and sometimes NBC (The transmitter is close, but they broadcast at a power of 100W (yes W, not kW). With a roof-mounted antenna I could certainly get NBC reliably).
We used to have a Fox station here, but the ABC affiliate bought it and shut it down.
I follow NFL and MLB, my wife follows NHL.
So I get Sunday night football. The good news is that MLB is very reasonably available live and online. You can even listen to your choice of home or away announcers.
Each one of the leagues has their own league pass so you can watch online. That doesn't work well if you want to watch the local team due to blackout restrictions, but it does if you just a general fan or you've moved away from your home town.
We cancelled the cable and we are less annoyed. We spend an extra 15 minutes downloading what we want, and we spend less time as vegetables just passively accepting what's coming down the pipe. Less time spent watching commercials that annoy us. It's very much worth it. (Although I miss watching live sports in HD... but not enough to pay for it)