The TV antenna is making a comeback

My experience was almost exactly that in the OP.

I bought my first TV used off craigslist 6 months ago (I'm 30, lived past 12 years w/o a television), mainly intending to use it as a big monitor to watch movies/tv shows from my laptop via HDMI.

I started to get into local sports, but wasn't willing to pay for cable. I suffered through a few poor quality (aka "was that a touchdown or interception?") internet streams of the games.

Then one day I recalled that had a TV, not just a big monitor. $15 dollars later I had an antennae and was getting the local football games over-the-air in great HD.

My understanding is that OTA HDTV is actaully uncompressed, which means you get the best HDTV picture quality when receiving over the air.

Cable, uVerse, DirecTV etc all compress their HDTV signals resulting in far more artifacts and pixelization. It is far more noticable when you have a 120 inch projector displaying a football game with lots of moving images etc.

In 2010 when I lived in the San Francisco I ordered my broadband from Comcast, but I didn't pay for the TV package.

I added a splitter to the Comcast coax cable, then plugged one wire into the cable modem and the other into the back of my TV. Network TV channels for no extra cost.

OTA TV is $250 per year in the UK, before equipment.

If you get satellite / cable you still have to pay.

If you watch live on computer, pay up.

I am always stunned of how USA are both forerunners of new technologies, and very backward as well... for credit cards with chip, digital television, gsm diffusion, etc etc... Also, in most of United States you can not get an european level ADSL.