I am starting to consider this cord-cutting thing too... we are big TV hounds, and big college basketball fans (watching on TV, not attending in the arena), so this is not a small thing for us to try to imagine. We moved away from our conference, so we rely on ESPN to keep us connected to our beloved teams. Live sports seems to be one thing that is difficult to get without some kind of basic cable or satellite.
Am I correct that you can't watch "WatchESPN" unless you are already an ESPN subscriber through cable or satellite?
We are also *addicted* to our DVR. We use it *all the time*. We don't watch anything live anymore. On the plus side for cord-cutting, though, we have 100+ episodes sitting in the DVR right now, including whole seasons of shows. Our typical pattern is to watch stuff stored in the DVR over the summer, when there's less original programming showing. As our daughter has gotten older, we spend less and less time watching TV. Right now, we're watching about an hour a night, usually less.
It's easy for me to imagine only getting local channels and it fulfilling about 75 percent of our TV needs. But that other 25 percent is still pretty important to us, at least from December - March.