The only thing keeping me from "cutting the cord" is my wife's infatuation with NHL hockey (well, any kind of hockey - she plays herself as well!) You don't find streaming sports, not major ones anyway, outside of traditional cable/satellite providers. There are NHL streaming packages you can buy where you can stream tons of hockey games, but for some bizarre reason they exclude your local teams games - which are of course the ones you want to watch in the first place!

Thats the whole fcc thing. Local stations went to the fcc when satellite was becoming popular and claimed they would loose advertising dollars and got the law passed that anything on a local station has to be blocked on non local connections.

www.hidemyass.com will make your computer seem like it's anywhere you want it to be. I use them and despite their ridiculous name, they are reliable, reputable and effective.

Verizon Home Phone Connect: http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/device/home-phone-connect

I replaced my landline after Sandy with this thing. Best thing I ever did. Cell service is MUCH MORE reliable than CableCo VoIP or local wireline provider. My home phone bill is now $26.00 a month.

Your ISP is definitely hiding lower-price "internet only" offers. How to find them? Call and cancel service. Tell them you'll "consider" keeping your internet connection only and all of the sudden they find $45 a month plans.

Problem is internet only + $26 for home phone = $10 less than bundle price for all three.

I keep checking on verizon fios hoping combining cell phone into the mix would cut costs too but it hasn't been available yet plus Verizon just introduced their new more (expensive) plan and switched me over and I'm trying to get switched back as is will cost $20 more per month and give less data.

I travel to the UK quite a bit and they have this thing called a "free market" for telecommunications.

Check this out - here's pricing for broadband connections near my UK office:

http://www.moneysupermarket.com/broadband/deals/E17HY/

£1 = $1.66

$50 a month gets you unlimited internet and phone for the most part.

I thought about masking my true IP address by bouncing through a relatives computer in another state (easy enough to do). It appears that "hidemyass" is just a commercialized (albeit, free) way to accomplish the same end result by using a proxy.

I did check with "NHL Game Center Live" support and they confirmed that you are able to watch all your local team games, but only AFTER a 48 hour blackout period has expired. You can rewind time and watch every game in its entirety once you've waited that two day penalty period. So if you don't mind a two day delay after a game has been played before you get to watch it, you don't need to go through the extra step of masking your true IP address. Still, waiting two days doesn't work very well when all the folks at your office are talking about the results of last nights game that you have not been able to watch yet.

But despite the potential hassles of trying to watch games by streaming, $49 per year for NHL Game Center Live is a heck of a lot cheaper than a monthly cable/satellite bill, especially since they tend to reserve the local sports channels to the higher priced programming packages. No such thing as a "Basic Cable With Local Sports" package. No siree, it has to be the expensive "America's Favorite 51,734 Channels Plus Local Sports" package before you can get the channels you actually want!

The Pay TV business is just massive and the "bundle" model is so entrenched that it's going to take a long time to unwind.

But it will unwind and it will be more along the lines of how you buy other media products (books, music) - a lower margin business than Pay TV is now, for sure.
The marginal costs of good content are high, and so good content will be expensive, but I expect the media business to evolve into tiers:

"Premium" is ad-free, first run shows. You buy shows by the season for about $40 each. This is how you can get some content today, but there are still time and place limits.
"Regular" is ad-supported first-run shows, you pay about $10 per network per month. This is close to what we have now (most people watch only 8 channels, so video part of your cable bill is about $80 a month)

"Economy" is ad-supported second-run shows. Ads are unkippable (like Hulu.com today.

And boy do folks moan about it!

I once had a business customer call in to moan about his slow FTTC Broadband. He was getting around 79 Meg/sec after getting him to plug his Gigabit Ethernet port on his PC to the Gigabit Ethernet port on his router.
I also checked his usage. His monthly usage was over 4 Tera Bytes so it couldn't have been that slow in the previous weeks.

As for the Pay TV model of watching TV, why bother? If we have total and utter drivel to watch in the UK, why on earth are you bothering in the USA. Music, Film, TV and other media has seriously declined in quality in the last 20 years.

There's a lot of TV out there. And there's a lot of very seriously bad TV, the kind of TV that causes brain damage and should be illegal to show to POWs. However, there is some good TV out there, more honestly than ever before. And it's getting easier to find the good TV, especially if you have some form of digital on demand service available.

Popular music is largely awful. One of the cool things about the Internet is that there's a lot more music available without major labels serving as gatekeepers. Good music can be found.