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Julie and Anthony Bayerl love watching prime-time shows on the sleek 50-inch television in their bedroom. They also love that they pay nothing for the programming.
The only thing they do not love is how a low-flying plane, heavy rain or just a little too much movement in the room can wipe out the picture.
"If someone is changing in there, it messes up your reception," said Julie Bayerl, a legislative assistant in St. Paul, Minn. "We try to stay very still when we watch television."
The Bayerls are using an old technology that many people across the country are giving a second chance. They pull free TV signals out of the air with the modern equivalent of the classic rabbit-ear antenna. And in a fashion, they are catching up with the way many Utahns have been watching TV for years.
Some viewers who have decided that they are no longer willing or able to pay for cable or satellite service, including younger ones, are buying antennas and tuning in to a surprising number of free broadcast channels. These often become part of a video diet that includes the fast-growing menu of options available online.
The antenna reception has also led many of these converts to discover — or rediscover — the frustration of weak and spotty signals. But its fans argue that it is tough to beat the price.
"My husband's best friend thinks we're big dorks for having rabbit ears and not cable," Julie Bayerl said. But when their introductory price for cable TV and Internet access expired this year and the bill soared to $150, the couple halved it by cutting TV. "It wasn't something we were willing to pay for," she said.
Many pay TV customers are making the same decision. From April to September, cable and satellite companies had a net loss of about 330,000 customers. Craig Moffett, a longtime cable analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein, said the consensus of the industry executives he had talked to was that most of these cord-cutters were turning to over-the-air TV.
"It looks like they're leaving for the antenna," he said.
Utah television viewers were some of the first in the country to benefit from the switchover to over-the-air TV. In 1996, state broadcasters that included KUED, KUTV, KSL, KBYU and KJZZ formed DTV Utah, one of the country's first digital television consortiums. That same year, they placed a digital antenna on top of Farnsworth Peak in the Oquirrh Mountains, one of the first markets to deliver a digital signal to viewers in the U.S.
"It says a lot about the community," said Donovan Reese, director of engineering for KUTV Channel 2. "Everybody understood it was coming and didn't reject it. Instead, we embraced it."
And because of the state's large number of rural households, many Utahns have stayed with antennas and free over-the-air broadcasts, even through the rise of cable and satellite. Although the state is 31st in the country in the number of households with TV, it's one of the largest in area, Reese said. Many of those viewers are residents in rural towns, where satellite or over-the-air antennas are the only way to get TV.
"A lot of people were already relying on us to get their signal" with antennas, Reese said. "And as we went digital, the quality they were getting from their picture just made it easier to keep getting it free."
Neil Smith, president of Comcast Cable, acknowledged in a recent call with investors that some customers had dropped cable for free signals. Company executives also said they expected business to rebound with the economy.
Last month, Time Warner Cable fought back with a lower-cost package that it said might appeal to people who are feeling the economic squeeze. For $40 in New York, or $30 in Ohio, customers can get a slimmed-down set of channels.
To be sure, around 90 percent of American households still pay for cable or satellite television — a figure that in recent years has been slowly and steadily rising. But American's relationship with television has recently been in flux, in part because of the nationwide switch in June to digital broadcast signals.
That initially gave pay TV providers a group of new subscribers who had worried that their old sets would not pick up the new signals. But analysts say some of those subscribers have since gone back to free signals.
Another big change is the rise of Internet video, which can ease the pain of losing favorite cable channels.
Bradley Lautenback, 28, who recently moved to Los Angeles to work at Disney, found enough alternatives to allow him to turn back the technological clock on his TV.
"I've always had cable. It's the thing you do when you move to a new place, call the company and set it up," he said. Not this time. Instead, he got an antenna and now watches over-the-air news and sports, complemented by episodes of shows such as "Entourage" that he buys from iTunes. "I don't miss cable at all," he said.
Industrywide figures on antenna sales are hard to come by, so it is difficult to tell how widely they are being adopted. Antennas Direct, a maker of TV antennas in St. Louis, expects to sell 500,000 this year, up from 385,000 in 2009, according to president Richard Schneider.
The company's digital TV antennas, like others on the market, are a far cry from the wire-hanger versions of old. The sleek circles encased in plastic look more like mouse ears than anything belonging to a bunny.
Schneider said that based on customer support calls and feedback from retailers, his customers were 20-somethings who pair over-the-air and Internet programming, people forced to make choices by a tough economy and others who, he argues, have long been eager to sever ties with their pay-TV provider.
"Over-the-air is the new basic cable," he said, arguing that free TV and Internet alternatives "are giving people the rationale they've been looking for to end a bad relationship."
Broadcasters, far from being troubled by the trend, believe it benefits them, according to Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters.
Wharton said broadcasters did not mind the move to over-the-air programming because those viewers were also potential audience members for the ads that support programming.
Modern antennas, which cost $25 to $150, pick up high-definition signals that can actually be crisper than the cable or satellite version of the same program, because the pay TV companies compress the video data.
But compared with analog broadcasts, which occasionally showed static, digital signals are less forgiving of interference and more likely to blank out altogether.
At a World Cup viewing party in a Brooklyn apartment last summer, the hosts encouraged guests to limit trips to the kitchen and the bathroom to avoid too many interruptions of the signal.