I haven't owned a television in years, and I've never heard of most of the shows on the survey.
About eight years ago, I was forced to move out of a WWII garret overlooking the East River. What happened was that the landlord had evicted another tenant for non-payment of rent, and the tenant reported the illegal apartment in retaliation. The story behind the garret is actually somewhat interesting (albeit off-topic), so I'll relate a bit of it.
Before I'd moved in, the landlord had assured me in good faith that the garret was legal because it had been "grandfathered." There actually were quite a few such apartments throughout the boroughs. They had been installed as observation posts during the Second World War and converted to rental units afterwards.
The city had provided for their legalization back in the 1970's, granting generous waivers of most code requirements as long as the units had fire escapes of some sort and the electrical, gas, and plumbing weren't unsafe. Things like minimum ceiling heights, stairway steepness and tread-to-rise ratios, requirements for overhead lighting fixtures, and so forth were waived.
But in this case, the previous landlord had never filed the paperwork back in the 1970's that would have made the place legal; and legalizing it after the long-past deadline would have required extensive modifications to bring the place up to current codes -- at an estimated cost of more than $30,000. Long story short, I had to move.
But the landlord was a good guy. He'd honestly believed that the place was legal when he rented it to me, and he knew that moving was an inconvenience and an expense; so he refunded the $6,000.00 in rent I'd paid for the six months I'd lived there -- in cash. Woo-hoo!
With cash in pocket, I decided to replace a lot of my old junk with new junk; so when I moved, I left my bulky old television to the lady downstairs, and left quite a bit of furniture and other stuff on the curb for sanitation pickup (after the neighbors plucked what they wanted out of it, of course).
After I moved, I replaced everything except the television. I just found that I didn't miss it enough to pay the then-astronomical prices for a new HDTV-capable television, or to buy an NTSC television that I knew would be obsolete in a few years. So I decided to wait until the HDTV prices came down.
Well, they've come down. In fact, on occasion I get offers for free ones if I take out a long-term subscription to one of the satellite companies (I have no OTA signal at all where I live). And on occasion, I consider their offers. But then when I visit friends or relatives who do have it, I realize that there's nothing on satellite that I like enough to justify the cost. My DSL is fast enough that I can watch all the movies I want on Netflix for less than ten bucks a month, I can go to my old man's house to watch sporting events with him (he likes having the company, anyway), and I can get all the news I need over the Internet and from the local weekly paper if I feel like making the 28-mile trip to pick up a copy.
If some satellite provider offered a truly basic service package, at a truly reasonable cost, without the long-term commitment, I might take their offer. I'd even purchase and install the equipment myself. But none of the providers seem interested in offering low-cost packages to people for whom television isn't all that important to begin with.
-Rich
