I'll tell you – after nearly a year with no cable? The only thing I miss is discovery HD. Everything else I can either torrent down (all my hbo/showtime shows. thank you eztv.it) or watch streaming (thank you hulu, southparkstudios.com and adultswim.com).

I did get pretty accustomed to watching stuff online. Trouble is these guys, just like you mentioned, DEMAND their money – I mean hey, how ELSE are they going to get their new porche ever year?

When I was in England visiting my girlfriends family for the holidays, I wanted to watch Lie to Me. Hulu gave me the finger and told me to take a hike – they didn't service the UK. Thankfully I've recently deployed zipline – a cisco based vpn solution I built for getting you off of unencrypted, unprotected lans – like starbucks and other coffee shops, or barcamps or etech or wherever – where anybody could be listening. Zipline both allows me to feel more secure about the lan that I'm on, and its side effect is that its 'exit node' is my business, with a static IP on time warner cable in the US. So I was able to easily watch everything I normally do, on another continent. (this also told me I need a haaaair more bandwidth)