Back in the (either) late Sixties (or) early Seventies we kids spent time between two households.
It was very civil and 'normal' to us but there was a certain sense of 'Living both in Spain and France' about it all; I suppose that makes me an ersatz-Basque.
One household had banned Television, even PBS (horrors!), but (perhaps sympathetically or even subversively) my maternal grandfather gave me an old black and white TV.
Showing up at Pop's with the evil idiot box didn't get it banned but I got some squirrely looks and it got locked down immediately. The one thing I recall being able to get us kids a chance at seeing was a (presumably rerun/ran) episode of 'Dark Shadows'.
We all clustered together, nobody having any thoughts of in-fighting over a different program at this point, and screamed at all the scary parts- until one scream too many got it unplugged and removed from our existence.
The Tyranny of Adult/Parenthood can be a drag sometimes.
On another subject;
DirecTV and others will likely package you a certain minimal number of set top boxes to de-scramble the (now almost all) Digital Signal being broadcast by them. It means, unless your (new-ish) TV has provisions to support something like a Subscriber's Card to enable an account with a content provider (Netflix, Comcast, etc, etc) then you may not even be able to view the 'plain' digital signal coming into the house from off of the pole.
(In the Analog Days you could expect to just pay your basic monthly fee and if you had a TV that didn't need HBO or some other premium offering on it, it could still get all the 'Free' TV there was to get, without the need for a Cable Box.)
These days, Expect to get one Basic box and an additional Box w/ DVR built in, for a total of two TVs hooked up at a time. Some packages have three units at the basic/entry level.
Each additional box will likely cost something like $5 each, or more, per month.
btw- (OtA Over the Air) Public Airwaves TV has mostly converted over to different frequency ranges and a Digital Signal as well. There are still some older Analog TV signals being broadcast these days, but they continue to fade away... But thats a discussion for another time.