OK folks, it finally happened. My mother has cut the cord and now gets all her TV needs satisfied via OTA and OTT. Yes, you heard right. My mother. The same woman who spent the better part of a decade (I cut the cord in late 2008) saying how she didn’t understand how I could not have cable. Someone check the temperature in Hell will ya? :)

All kidding aside, Mom (and Dad before he passed) has spent the past several years canceling Dish and DirecTV and switching back-n-forth between them to get the best ’new customer’ rates and deals. But as Mom starts eyeing retirement and DirecTV keeps upping her bill $2 at a time for various fees, she’d had enough.

So, over the course of the last few months, I walked Mom through getting a TCL Roku TV:

(Note, that’s actually a picture of the 55" which I bought last Aug. Mom bought the 32" even though I argued for the 37")

Then I walked her through using the 1byone 50-mile HDTV antenna I had previously bought her. And finally, I signed up for the DirecTVNow beta on Roku and waited for the DVR functionality to launch.

With all the pieces in place, we spent the afternoon setting everything up during my recent visit. We had a few little bumps that weekend, and I’m going to be getting her a Tablo DUO in the near future so we can use the 1byone on both TVs, but otherwise she adjusted to it all pretty easily. I even hooked up a Roku stick to the TV in the spare bedroom and showed her its all exactly the same as in the living room (minus the OTA locals, of course). Listening to her argue w/ the DirecTV phone rep during the cancellation call was extremely satisfying and made me proud. Mom still can’t seem to believe that for $35/mo she is getting everything she used to pay almost $100/mo for. But she’s already been telling her friends about it all :)

So .. if you still haven’t cut the cord, what are you waiting for?