I keep reading about people who use over-the-air HDTV antennas and a box to get stuff from Netflix or Hulu or simply off YouTube. $35 for a Chromecast dongle is really tempting. But there's always a catch (you can't yet get HBOGo without a cable subscription, there are still local blackouts for MLB.TV and you can't watch the post-season live online., many of the streaming TV shows are a day or more late, etc., etc.).

We get something like 500 channels (with numbers from 1 to 2900 or so). We watch maybe 5 of them regularly. :-/ Maybe if they had a better ala carte selection mechanism then more people would stay (sure some channels would die, and we would lose some good stuff, but we'd lose a lot of crap too). Supposedly the Tennis Channel has some of the best viewer demographics - a channel doesn't need 10M viewers to do well.

Don't feel bad if you sensibly decide to cut the channels after the trial period - you'll have lots of company.

Good luck.

Cheers,
Scott.