About 20 years ago ago, I told my wife that I wanted to spend $100 to buy something called a Tivo for our Direct TV. She reluctantly said okay but she did not see the need for it because we had a VCR. A number of years later, the Tivo box quit working and her response was that we have to buy an other one, NOW.
Three months ago, I told her that I wanted to spend about $600 on something called a Tablo and get rid on our cable box but I was not certain it would work. She told me to do it. Five days later our cable tv was gone. It was a rocky couple of weeks and the results are not perfect but we are both happy with the results. We are down to occasional, minor pixillation and a few Roku/Tablo issues that we can accept.
Restaurants use to be empty on the nights that certain tv shows aired and now we can watch the shows that we like on our own schedule. With OTA recording, We will pay about $130 less for that privilege when We recover our equipment cost in February.