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Opening a hefty cable or satellite-dish bill each month can make you feel like a sucker, especially if much of what you watch can be had for free.
The average cable bill was $98.75 at the end of 2007, according to market research firm SNL Kagan. That has given many strapped consumers incentive to pull the plug.
How can you watch your favorite television shows and movies without paying a dime?
Here's our guide to the best online and offline ways to get your entertainment fix.
TV without paying for it
Rabbit ears: If you're the old-fashioned type, you can put out an antenna and get your local television channels for free on your old analog set.When the transition to digital television happens in February, however, you'll also need a digital converter box to get the signal. You can receive free coupons for these boxes courtesy of Uncle Sam.
But this works only for local programming. If you want Bravo's "Top Chef," for example, or if you want shows from weeks or months past, you're going to have to look on the Web.
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You can stream your favorite CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox shows in their entirety at the networks' Web sites. These networks have found that making episodes available online doesn't diminish their broadcast audiences, says Kurt Scherf, a technology analyst with Parks & Associates.
Therefore, most are of good video quality. But they do contain ads, and the number of episodes you can watch varies widely from three of CBS' hit show "CSI" to what appears to be a full season of NBC's "30 Rock."
Hulu, a joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp., allows you to stream current shows from NBC and Fox the day after they air and provides content past and present from 50 other providers, such as Sony Pictures Television and Warner Bros. So it's your choice: "The Office" or "Fantasy Island." And you have the option of watching in high resolution, unlike at some other sites.
You can watch shows from many of these networks on MSN TV, AOL and other portals. Joost, TidalTV and Veoh are also good places to watch television from years past, as well as a handful of episodes from current shows. If you like to watch National Geographic or Discovery Channel programs, you can check out Miro, which offers thousands of options, mostly from independent content providers and with excellent video quality.
One nice thing about watching network shows online is that you can watch an entire season's worth of episodes at a time (if you want) or catch episodes you missed from seasons past. Most of the sites seem to have a full-screen option.
The downside of watching a streaming show, especially if you are using a wireless connection, is that there's the occasional freeze or hitch and the audio and video can get out of sync. Joost and Miro also require downloads of their media players.
And, of course, you have good old YouTube and Daily Motion for getting the occasional television episode and short video, should sitcoms start to bore you.
TV on the black market: If you don't want to bother with streaming episodes in real time, you can look for torrent files of your favorite shows on file-sharing sites and use free BitTorrent software such as Tomato Torrent to download these files.
The upside is that viewers can get entire seasons at a time and burn them onto DVDs. Of course, this particular method is called piracy, and it's illegal. But because enforcement of federal piracy law has focused more on sites offering the pirated material than on the people using them, many people take their chances on sites like The Pirate Bay, a Swedish-run Web site made notorious after police raided its offices and seized its servers in 2006.
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