The single most useful fact for anyone leaving cable: your local ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and PBS affiliates are broadcasting free, over the air, right now, and the television you already own almost certainly has the tuner to receive them. You do not need an account, a subscription, a login or an internet connection. You need a piece of metal and a channel scan.
This matters because local channels are the most common reason people hesitate to cancel, and in most of the country they are the easiest part to replace rather than the hardest. Cable was reselling you a free broadcast.
Route one: an antenna. Free forever, if your address cooperates.
One purchase, somewhere between $27 and $100 depending on what you need, and then nothing ever again. No account, no password, no price rise letter, and it keeps working during an internet outage — which is exactly when you most want local news and weather.
The catch is that it depends on where you live, and no product claim can tell you that. So do this before anything else: put your street address into the FCC’s DTV Reception Maps tool. It returns the stations predicted at your exact location and how strong each should be. Thirty seconds, free, authoritative, and it decides everything that follows.
Strong predictions— an indoor flat antenna in the right window will very likely get them. Start there; it is cheap and reversible.
Moderate predictions— an indoor antenna might work. Try one, and treat the attic as your fallback rather than giving up.
Weak or no predictions— you need an outdoor or attic antenna, which is a real install, or you take route two. The FCC says so itself: “generally, outdoor antennas will get better reception than indoor antennas and are strongly recommended for the most reliable reception.”
One trap to check while you are looking at that report: note the channel numbers. The FCC defines VHF as channels 2 to 13 and UHF as 14 to 36, and warns explicitly that many antennas sold as “HDTV antennas” receive UHF well but VHF less well. If one of your networks is a low number, buy an antenna that publishes VHF coverage — otherwise you can spend real money on a big antenna and still miss exactly one station.
What you do not have to match is your television. Any antenna works with any set that has a coax input, whatever brand or smart platform is running the menus — our antenna picks for a smart TV explain why, and cover the one case where it is not that simple: a panel sold as a display, with no tuner inside at all.
Route two: a live-TV streaming service. Works anywhere, costs forever.
Several live-TV streaming services carry local affiliates in most markets, delivered over your internet connection rather than through the air. The advantage is that reception is irrelevant — a basement apartment with no sky view gets the same picture as a hilltop house. The disadvantage is structural: it is a monthly bill, and a monthly bill is the thing you were leaving.
Two things to verify before committing. First, that the service actually carries yourlocals, because coverage varies by market and by station group and changes with contract negotiations. Second, that your connection is adequate — per the FCC’s published figures, HD video needs 5 to 8 Mbps and Ultra HD 4K needs 25 Mbps per simultaneous stream, so a household watching two streams needs reliable capacity for both.
We are not going to quote prices for these services, because they change frequently enough that any figure here would be wrong by the time you read it. Check the current price on the service’s own site.
A third option that costs nothing and is easy to miss
Most network affiliates run their own free apps and websites with recent episodes, local news clips and sometimes a live stream of their newscast. The free ad-supported streaming services also carry 24-hour news channels assembled from local station groups.
This will not replace watching the ten o’clock news live. For a household that only occasionally wants local content, it is genuinely enough, and it costs nothing — worth checking before you conclude you need hardware at all.
The honest comparison over a year
An indoor antenna is roughly $27 to $60, once. An outdoor antenna with mounting hardware is more like $100 to $200 plus an afternoon of work, once. A live-TV streaming service with locals is a monthly figure, every month, that historically rises.
So the arithmetic is lopsided whenever the antenna route is available: the antenna is cheaper in the first year and free in every year after. The streaming service wins only on the dimension that matters most when reception fails — it works regardless of where you live, which for a genuinely poor-reception address is the whole ballgame.
That is why the order of operations is: check the FCC map, try an antenna if the map is encouraging, and treat the streaming service as the fallback rather than the default.
What you gain that cable did not give you
Two things worth knowing, because they are genuine upsides rather than consolation.
Better picture quality on the local channels.Cable and satellite compress channels to fit more of them down a finite pipe. An over-the-air broadcast arrives at the station’s full transmitted bitrate, uncompressed by a middleman. On a large TV showing live sport, the difference is often visible.
Sub-channels you never had.Most affiliates broadcast several additional digital channels alongside the main one — classic television, 24-hour weather, Spanish-language networks, old movies. Cable often did not carry them. A channel scan routinely turns up twenty to forty channels where someone expected five, and this is where the extras come from.
If you want to record it
An antenna gets you live TV; recording needs an OTA DVR. The thing to watch for is a monthly guide-data fee, which would quietly reinstate the recurring cost you canceled cable to avoid. The models we recommend state no subscription on their own listings — see best OTA DVRs.
Where this sits in the bigger decision
Getting the locals back is one piece of replacing cable. If you are still deciding between an antenna, a live TV bundle or both, best cord cutting TV service lays the four routes side by side. And if what you really miss from cable is the recording rather than the channels, an over-the-air DVR with no subscription gives you that back without putting a monthly fee on your statement again.
Two pages for the practical next steps. If you are buying the hardware for the first time, the cord-cutting starter kit prices the four parts and says which two most households actually need. And if choosing the antenna itself is the part you are stuck on, how to choose a TV antenna starts with the free address lookup that decides it rather than with the mile rating on the box.