Maybe I should buy an antenna and go back to watching local TV
In my area there use to be 3 channels on the airwaves 1 x VHF Channel 3 and 2 x UHF 31, and 41 in New Hampshire. Now its down to 1 channel. If your in an area that still has VHF or UHF stations that havent gone 100% digital, your good, but if I were to hook up a TV back to antenna i'd be lucky to pick up the 1 and only channel left in my area which use to have some snow to its quality even with a good antenna.
When I moved out on my own in 1994 I went about a year with just 3 channels and the VCR was used heavily to record shows that were on either when I was sleeping or working, as for with just 3 channels there is not much choice in content to watch, so the VCR was a ways to compress all the content I wanted to watch to a tape, but still the same content even though different episodes got old. In 1995 I landed a good job to have extra money vs living paycheck to paycheck and got cable TV. Last year I severed the tie with cable TV and went to streaming only to save money due to no more extra income to burn and I'd go weeks without turning the TV on, and my family also were no longer watching cable TV, but instead streaming everything. So here we are in 2014 streaming everything to the TV or Computers now unless playing a DVD or BluRay or dusting off the ancient VCR to play older movies.
My biggest annoyance with the streaming was that it soon had many commercials like cable TV, but soon I found ad-block plus and was able to avoid wasted time watching ( or not so much watching, but listening for the audio to change back to the show to look back to the display ) with the 8th same commercial cutting in every 6 minutes of a show.
For the paid netflix streaming service we are happy with, however netflix sometimes gets hammered with traffic and even though we have plenty of bandwidth one show you want to watch streaming will buffer every 30 seconds while if you switch to a less popular show or movie to watch you can watch it with no buffering interruptions.
Ad-Block Plus doesnt seem to block the free hulu, but it does block ads on youtube and crackle which is nice.
As far as Amazon goes, I buy products through their site, but I dont use their streaming services. I checked them out a ways back and didnt see anything good that was worth paying to watch. Maybe they have added more shows and movies to make it worth paying money, but... if you pay for Amazon, Hulu Plus, Netflix, and others soon your bills add up to the price of cable TV and there is no more savings.
The worst that can become of this price increase on Amazons part would be if there was a cooperation between all the online streaming identities to all raise their prices to pry more cash from everyones pockets. Generally its a good thing to have competition to avoid a monopoly, since one will be cheaper than the other to fight for customer base, but if they all strategically raised their prices then there is no longer a cheap way out to watch streaming content.
Crackle.com is my favorite free streaming site out there. I havent found any others that are as good as crackle that are free.
