A few months ago, I cancelled cable. At the time, I justified it because cable was costing me around $80 a month and, with a young child, I just didn’t have time to watch it. What has been surprising to me is how little I’ve missed it. Many people can’t conceive of life without television, but I have found it is easily substituted with two technologies: 1) the web and 2) podcasts.

In the days before the web was as robust as it is today, the amount of information, news, and entertainment was limited. In the early 90s, I remember going to Yahoo! (at that time a website based at Stanford) to see what was new each day. Most of my internet use was centered around USENET newsgroups, discussion forums that were focused on particular interests (in my case, alt.coffee was the one I frequented most). On slow days during the summer, I’d occasionally have read everything - all the USENET posts, all the web pages of interest. There was nothing left on the internet.

That’s not a problem today. I generally have a running list of questions in the back of my mind that I have intended to look up but haven’t had a chance to yet.

Sometimes I need a source of news or entertainment and web-browsing is inadequate or inconvenient. That’s where podcasting comes in. Some of the television shows I used to watch are available as podcasts (NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s 60 Minutes). I use audio-only versions of these programs and listen to them during downtime (e.g. in the gym, in the car, on the subway), so they don’t really eat into my free time. Part of the experience is lost without the video, but not much, and video podcasts are also available for many programs.

For entertainment, there’s my list of tech shows (This Week In Tech, MacBreak Weekly, Diggnation), brief educational shows (Legal Lad, Grammar Girl, 60 Second Science), and other entertainment from NPR (Car Talk, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me), all of which are free (and can be found easily via iTunes).

My opinion may be a bit biased by the lack of time I now have for sitting down in front of the TV uninterrupted, but give it a try. You might save yourself $80/month.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 6:20 am and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.