Boxee. Google TV. Apple’s iTV. BitTorrent. All these things is purported to be killing cable television, but consistent with a Big Apple Times/CBS News poll, 88% of respondents are still buying cable. Fess up! What’s keeping you cablin’?

Here are my suspicions, based by myself content consumption.

Certain shows can’t be watched elsewhere, at the least not live.

I’ve given over to my passion for HBO’s True Blood, despite that it wasn’t the serious look into vampirism that I was first expecting from Alan Ball-and despite that on every occasion Tara comes on screen everyone in my house looks at each other and starts flapping our lower lips around whimpering Suuuhhhkie, faux-emote ourselves into near cataplexy.

But you’ll be able to’t watch True Blood on Sunday night as it’s broadcast without cable. You may download it tomorrow from legal and not more-than outlets online, but you won’t get to discuss it over the apocryphal water cooler until Tuesday.

Channel surfing is really variety of fun.

Part of the explanation I don’t keep cable television in my house is because I am too inclined to plop down on the couch once I’m bored and mindlessly flip through channels. Since television consumption just continues to head up and up, I think that for plenty of the steady drip of mediocre content that enables one to turn off the brain for it slow is basically definitely worth the hundred bucks or so that cable television costs each month. No judgement from me-I certainly can’t argue that the hours and hours I spend day by day on the net reading pointless tech news is to any extent further fundamentally gratifying to my soul-but I’ve got enough addictions in my own life to succumb to the lure of a thousand channels.

Sports.

The only time I’ve been a cable subscriber within the last couple of years was during World Cup. If I were more into other sports, i’d very likely must be a subscriber. Fortunately the only real other sport I like to observe on television is football and I love to try this in a bar with other fans.

Watching streaming content is usually a pain inside the ass.

I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report nearly every evening. Jon Stewart is my Johnny Carson. But I will’t inform you what number times through the years I’ve sat down on the couch, unfolded a browser, and then had to fiddle with something to attempt and get the stream from TheDailyShow.com (or previously, Hulu) to truly start. Flash might crash. The quality of the stream probably degraded. The show might cut to commercial, then puke out when looking to load back.

And I even have a Mac Mini installed to my television, that’s so much more robust than the experiences I’ve had with devices like Apple TVs or other XBMC-based media centers like Boxee. When it works it’s great, nevertheless it’s not exactly optimal, especially when much of the content I would like is on different sites. Services like Hulu were alleged to ease the pain by putting each of the content in one place, but then some content providers started getting cold feet and keeping their shows on their lonesome sites. Search and subscription methods from within media players will help, but it surely’s still not as fire-and-forget as using a DVR from a cable provider.

Along those same lines, it’s also possible that using a mouse and a keyboard on the couch still feels weird for folk. It’s fine for me, but I’m a dork.

Enough about my own pet theories, though. What’s holding you back from canceling cable entirely? And may you notice yourself ever dumping it for one more pay service like iTunes or Amazon? What would it not take to your family to move all internet on your television?

Image: Boxee.com

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This post is tagged: Cable, content, Subscribing, television, why