Living without Cable or Satellite - a growing trend

I'm hearing about it more and more, frustrations with the rising and unreasonable costs of cable and satellite television. People abandoning these "traditional" forms of tv in favour of the new "normal" Netflix and Shomi accounts only.  

I've been living in my house for 3 years now and we only just got some (free for us) satellite set up. But for 3 years we happily lived without!

In the beginning, my roommate and I invested in the unlimited gb internet package instead of getting cable set up. Best decision ever I think! We could stream, watch, play, download and Google to our hearts content without paying anything more than our set monthly Internet charge. We bought Netflix, which satisfies our movie and series cravings for the most part as well. 

Anything else we wanted to watch, we hopped onto the good old Internet to find. Besides YouTube which seems to have all the awful tv shows I like (judge shows, Maury and Steve Wilkos.. hah!) there are a bunch of free movie apps we used too like Crackle, A&E, City, Viewster, Snag Films, or PopcornFlix. 

Or how about Smart Tvs, that come preloaded with all kinds of different apps for show watching too, like Vimeo, . If there was something we craved that we couldn't find, we went to our "The Beat Goes On" store to buy it for less than $5 (and then it was permanently ours) or asked to borrow it from a friend. My roommate would go to his parents house for any big things like the Super Bowl. 

Or, though I promote nothing as I don't know anything about them, there are things that kind of act like cable boxes - android boxes I think they are. Had we not got satellite we might have looked into this option. 

The only reason we got satellite was for the sports games. We found these a little difficult to find streaming online for free. Even now with the satellite, we aren't technically paying for it as its an add-on to my parents account with a second box and portable dish for no extra money. Rather than sit in their basement, we said yes to hooking it up here. I still watch the majority of my shows on my iPad and phone, while "the boys" watch their sports on the tv.