Everyone around me has cable, just about, and it costs around $50/month. (That's with a couple premium channels, like HBO -- less for a stripped down package.)
There's satellite for maybe a hair more.
The regular broadcast stuff is strictly local stations, and without an exterior antenna, I think I can get two stations, one of which is a Fox affiliate.
I could tell you more about the business of TV, but it might get boring -- basically, local broadcasters are being absorbed by conglomerates at an alarming rate. They used to function as sort of subscribers/franchisees to a network -- generate so much money in local advertising, subscribe to a network feed, and make up whatever timeslots the network stuff didn't fill with locally produced programs (like, oh NEWS.) Cable has interfered with that, since so much of the programming there is non-local (which is why the FCC mandated the existence of public-access channels, which is where Wayne's World came from). Satellite is like cable-plus, since it's more ubiquitous (one source, potentially every home anywhere) -- people pay for descramblers, really.
All my friends seem to use TIVOs now. I do the same thing, only lower down the scale, by using Netflix. |
