My wife and I went to bed last night feeling like failures.

You see, we did something last night that a month or two ago we would have never dreamed of doing again. We were nervous. We had that knot in our bellies that you only get when you’re on the edge of making a big life-changing decision. But, ultimately we decided to throw caution to the wind and just do it. We’d work out the ramifications later.

Soon afterward, we went to bed as new DirecTV1 subscribers.

A year ago, we made the collective decision to pull the plug on our U-Verse TV service and go completely online and over-the-air for our video entertainment.

Overall, the plan we laid out was never really put into place. For a month or two after pulling the plug, I was a fairly regular Hulu user. And, we’ve been Netflix subscribers for the past year. But, we really never used either service beyond the summer.

Our main source of TV has been regular old ATSC antenna reception. And, that’s been fine for us. The PBS station here has a sub-channel that runs a PBS version of HGTV/Food/DIY programming, and there was even a sub-channel that runs kids programming that has been really good for Nathan. And, when the TV is on as background noise (as it usually is for some inexplicable reason), it’s usually on one of those two channels.

But lately the reception on most of our channels has gotten really bad. Whereas earlier on we only had one channel that was plagued with heavy pixelization and freezing, now it seems that all channels are suffering from that problem.

Mix that in with the fact that Mad Men Season 4 is getting ready to fire up, everyone in my Twitter stream is talking about Louie and that DirecTV was running a great promotion up until today… well, we caved.

So, on August 3rd we’ll rejoin the ranks of cable/satellite viewers and we can stop thinking we’re “better than everyone else.”2 Soon after, I’ll kill the Netflix subscription and probably drop the speed of my DSL package from 18 MBps to 10.

And, on that next Sunday, you’ll probably find me just as you did a year ago — watching two solid hours of How It’s Made on the Science Channel.

I don’t know whether to be happy or to stew in my own salty tears.