Ever since a friend showcased a plethora of channels she was receiving in her home via a sample rabbit ear setup, I started to consider giving up my cable bill.

We pay around $120 for TV (basic cable) + Internet (8 Mbit) + digital phone.  We use the phone very rarely because we also have the AT&T cell phone plan.  The Internet we use a lot, but we can cut the speed in half and not even notice.  The TV — we watch Jon Stuart, Burn Notice, and Saturday Night Live, but I’m hearing all 3 can be gotten on the Internet.

So it makes more and more sense to give up Time Warner — after all, for the price of 2 months of TW, one could buy an XBox 360 and unlimited streaming movies and shows …

I’ll give it a shot and will let y’all know …

UPDATE: Cancelled Time Warner phone and cable, left only the 8Mbit Internet service.  Got a $20 Philips antenna (UHF/VHF), and receiving all network TV channels in both analog and HD !!! It’s a little weird that the antenna is a little touchy, i.e. if you touch it, the TV signal breaks up.  It makes total sense because analog signal creates “snow” if interrupted, while digital signal is either “there” or “not there”.

Anyway … so far so good … I do miss the DVR though :)

UPDATE: Lame!  The digital reception is starting to break up … so I bought a beefier $50 Philips powered antenna, but the result was even WORSE — some channels (ABC) completely disappeared, although the remaining ones seemed to improve a tad.  Next steps: either mount the antenna outside on a mast, or get some other solution.