My $0.02 -
Because of the region that I live in and the fact that Dish had a run in with MSG Network, Dish cut local sports for any subscriber who's local sports network would have been MSG - AND - they continued to charge such subscribers the full price for the package even though they were not fulfilling their end of the bargain. So, all of us affected Dish subscribers were subsidizing other Dish subscribers IMHO because of this. That said, my primary sport is hockey, and I watch virtually no other sports on TV. For me, if I wanted to, I could subscribe to NHL.com and get more hockey than I know what to do with.
That said, my wife and I cut the cable about three months ago. We are using a mix of OTA and Internet including Hulu+, Netflix, Amazon Prime, iTunes, and if something goes awry with our OTA recordings, sites like NBC.com or ABC.com or the like.
Now you could say that just because we made that decision, we are happy with it. However, I have to disagree that that is sound reasoning in our case simply because of the fact that we were paying $87/mo for Dish plus our internet connection at $41.95 / mo (Earthlink over cable).
Now, however, we get Hulu+ for free with Bing Points, Netflix at $8/mo, Amazon at the Student rate (since I am pursuing a degree at a local university) and my wife subscribes to a show on iTunes for $4 / mo, and 15 MB Earthlink for $34.95 / mo. Our TV total comes to $16 / mo. I'm not counting the internet because we would have it anyway. So, the drop from $87/mo to $16/mo is substantial, IMHO, basically we are paying less than 20% of what we were paying.
I did build an A10-7850K system, Win 8.1, MediaPortal, and a BR burner so that we can both watch BR discs and, if we want, archive things to disc. Up front, the cost of all the hardware (including OTA tuners, a nice HTPC case seasonic supply, etc.) was about $1,500 which will pay for itself over time.
Because there is a wide variety of viewing material out there, we still cannot find the time to watch everything that we would like to watch - much as it was when we subscribed to Dish.
So, for what I consider valid reasons other than "we made the decision ourselves," mainly that we are not paying $87 / mo for a large amount of things we were never watching (instead, we are only paying $16/mo for a large amount of things we are never watching
), we are very happy with what we have now to the point of we will never return to the traditional pay TV model of our own free will.
So, I'm not buying the argument of we like it because we decided to do it. To me, that would be like having a really bad smell in the area and saying you do not mind it because you are holding your nose. We decided to cut the cord based on economic considerations, and we were reluctant to do so since we had no idea whether we would be able to find all the programming we wanted or could substitute for other programming we watch. We cut the cord anyway, and we are both very satisfied with our decision.
