Just three decades ago, cable television hadn’t really yet spread out across the country. Sure, major metropolitan areas had it, and it was on the cusp of becoming a cultural phenomenon. However, for many folks, if you wanted to subscribe to the movie channels, you needed to buy an expensive satellite dish – one that’s ten times or more the size of today’s dish TV devices.
Today, cable still hasn’t made it to many places. There are some old dirt roads that are never going to have it. On top of that, many folks prefer dish TV to cable for a number of reasons, such as channel selection or cost.
The big question for many folks is, then, what would you do without your dish TV?
Let’s say that a meteor storm hits the planet tomorrow, knocking out all of the dish TV satellites. (For purposes of this argument, we’ll assume that the military satellites out there are all equipped with lasers, and that security isn’t so much an issue for the country as entertainment.) This would mean that you’d have to either go to cable for your TV needs, or you’d have to settle for those three over-the-air networks.
(Maybe you live in a metropolitan area, and in addition to CBS, NBC and ABC you also have FOX and Whatever the CW is calling itself these days. In that case, you’re settling for five networks.)
Could you survive without all of that dish TV?
Of course you could survive. You might have to buy a digital antenna for your television in order to get those networks. You might have to invest in an appliance that will let you stream TV, such as Apple TV or a Blu-Ray player that can stream Netflix. The options out there, quite frankly, are somewhat staggering.
In a worst case scenario, you could become one of those families that you read about occasionally in the newspaper or a magazine. You know, the ones that drop their dish TV or cable in order to spend more time together as a family, or to keep the TV from rotting their kids’ brains.