I've been a fan of free television for a long time, ditching cable for most of the last 15 years. Going cable-free has certainly become easier with the advent of streaming. If you go back more than 20 years, I built a PC in this sweet "stereo" case intended for your living room, and in that computer I had two over-the-air tuners. TV was still standard definition, so even then, you could load up a hard drive with so much stuff. The basic cable channels were not scrambled or encrypted in any way either, so if you did have cable, you had your own DVR, without the cost of subscribing to TiVo at the time. I used software called BeyondTV for that, and it was awesome.
Broadcast TV still has had some stuff that we watch, mostly awards shows and some sporting events. Oh, and we used to DVR the nightly news and SNL. Six years ago I bought a FireTV Recast from Amazon, which was a pretty great little box that you attached to an antenna and your network, and it recorded stuff off-air. Unfortunately, Amazon discontinued support for Recast, and it crashes a lot. It's a bummer, because it worked pretty seamlessly with the FireTV sticks on our TV's. Fortunately, there's a little box called a Tablo that does essentially the same thing, so I bought one of those, hoping to get a few years out of it before everything is streaming. And unlike the Recast, it seems to be getting our CBS affiliate, so we can actually watch the Tony's this weekend.
Beyond that, the landscape is so much better. Peacock seems prepared to perpetually charge $20 per year, so that covers NBC, which will also have the NBA back starting next season. ABC and FOX stuff is mostly carried on Hulu. We do the Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle ad-free for $30, totally worth it. CBS is Paramount+, the old people channel, and there's nothing I want to watch there other than the Tony's (60 Minutes segments are all on YouTube). We're not big sports people, though we do enjoy watching as much of the US Open as possible. We usually get a Sling trial for that, which includes ESPN, and it's cheap the first month. I don't know how regular Sling or YouTubeTV makes it, because it's cable-expensive.
The eventual retirement of broadcast TV makes me kind of sad, because it's the thing that I aspired to work in. That, and terrestrial radio, which has been completely useless for a very long time. I haven't listened to it since maybe the mid-aughts, when 107.9 The End met its, uh, end, in Cleveland. But maybe when that all shrivels up, more marketing dollars will move online, helping those of us who have a side-hustle on the Internets not tied to a social platform.
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