[dewdude]

Hulu has been letting people cut the cords from cable....and cable complained enough Hulu is changing. Soon, you will have to confirm you have a cable subscription in order to have a Hulu subscription. Its possible they could lock it to just cable, leaving satellite and fiber people in the dust...but I haven't heard about that.

The FTA stuff doesn't have much from what I can tell. I haven't had a chance to look lately. Lyngsat has a chart with all known FTA stuff. I'd say its a novelty at best, but your milage may vary.

I, like some people, was ruled out of the cable market. We've got the line from 20 years ago, but due to the fact I live in the woods, its very lossy. Comcast condemned the line 7 years ago. We tried to get cable again and they came down, hooked up, and told us nope....our line failed to qualify for both analog and digital. Did they want to do anything? Of course not, that'd cost them money. They offered to upgrade the line, off setting the install cost (estimated at about $600) to us. We promptly told them no, but they *still* send us junk mail.

I dumped satellite because I live in the woods, and just SD was not enough. I couldn't get *any* of the satellite for Dish...and DirecTV was almost as difficult.

Needless to say, when Verizon showed up offering a big jug of Kool-Aid called Fios, I not only drank it, but let the kool aid man bust a hole through the wall. 2 weeks later, Verizon has run 1500 ft of fiber, to my house. All I had to do was sign the two year agreement. Vastly superior to cable...not quite the HD channel selection, but excellent picture...and it goes down less often than cable (try never) and no more rain-fade...or being in every IAD flight path, plane-fade. The internet is also a dream.

I'm paying a lot...more than I would with cable, but I'm getting a quality of service that backs it up....I mean, comeon, excellent HD picture *and* roughly 40 megabits of bandwidth? I'm happy with that.

I still use Netflix though, except we can have about 5 streams going, in HD, at once.

But big cable is working to make sure the free/low cost services are no longer attractive as alternatives.