How can I stop being a slave to cable utilities?

I’ll be following this thread for sure. I’ve been considering combining everything with my cable service. I don’t like it, but the cost seems to be so much better.

Just axe the cable. They still make free mediocre television, and movie rentals are cheap.
You may have heard a bunch of hullabaloo about HD broadcasting and converter boxes and what. The DVR may have to go back to the cable company.

We don’t have cable or satalite service anymore. My wife is always checking out DVD’s from the library for free. I get my news from the internet, radio and news papers. We save a lot of money this way and still watch great movies.

It really depends on how much independence you actually want. If you opt for high-speed internet (which will generally require you to sign up with one of the “utilities”), you pretty much get everything you would get with standard cable by hooking your laptop or hard drive to your television (it’s easiest if everything is fairly knew – e.g., you can connect the units using HDMI ports). If you have netflix, you have access to a pretty significant library of streaming videos. That plus Hulu and you pretty much won’t want for content. Generally (in NYC) this service costs a little over $30, which is a significant discount compared to cable generally, and you aren’t locked in to watching based on the networks’ schedules. So, you won’t fully escape…but you’ll kind of stick it to them without sacrificing very much on your end.

Read this.