Many of my friends, mostly my online ones, have cut the cord. This means they’ve opted to cancel their cable TV service and instead use services like Hulu, Netflix or Amazon Video for their main video entertainment source. With the cost of Roku boxes (which deliver these online video sources to your TV), Apple TVs and connected DVD players becoming so affordable these days, it’s easy to get Netflix and Hulu into your living room.

There are multiple reasons to cut the cord, some do it to eliminate high costs, some do it because they don’t want their kids watching traditional TV and others because they just aren’t into TV programming any more.

According to this Engadget article, 2.65 million cable subscribers cut their service between 2008 and 2011, with more than 1.5 of the cutters doing so in 2011. So this means the rate of those cutting the cord is increasing dramatically.

In my household, my wife and I have discussed cutting cable TV service. However, there are two main reasons we don’t: Disney Junior and college football. You see, our young kids are really into Disney Junior shows, 4 of them, actually – and Disney Junior isn’t available on Netflix, Amazon Video or another service.

Also, I’m a huge college football fan and watching live sports on an online video service isn’t a reality yet. 🙁

While we haven’t cut the cord, we do use the DVR to explicitly filter what our kids see. We *never* watch live TV with our kids in the room because of the freakish and nasty stuff that comes on the TV, even during ‘family safe’ programming. In our case, it’s movie previews, news teases and other things we don’t want out young kids to see. Even when the Olympics were on, we would watch them DVR-delayed so we could fast forward through the commercials.

For us, we want to cut the cost and cut the cord, but for our family viewing habits, it’s just not a reality yet.

What about you? Have you cut the cord recently…or are you on the verge?

Image credit: Torley