Alternative TV

I'm on a mission, a mission to end my support for cable or satellite TV providers. Those guys take a big chunk of money from me every month for basically 3-4 channels I watch irregularly. I'm looking for an alternative.

Enter Boxee, a free, internet-based media appliance. It's in super-geek, alpha stage right now, running on only Mac and Linux, but man, is it cool. I'm able to access, with an old 1.3 GHz PC running Ubuntu Linux and GeForce 5200 video card hooked up to my HDTV, a lot of mainstream content, like MTV, PBS, and Netflix (only with Boxee on a Mac right now, sigh), but also very interesting content from places like Make Magazine TVand Boing Boing TV using RSS feeds, all while using a remote (a Wiimote, no less!) In addition, Boxee will display pictures, play music (both online and local), and share viewing recommendations among friends. Very, very cool. I'm getting an AppleTV with some of my summer school money to get a quiet, dedicated computer to run, in addition to AppleTV content, Boxee with Netflix! TV providers, Goodbye!

For a much less geeky approach, in addition to AppleTV, you may also be interested in a little box called Roku. It'll stream Netflix and YouTube to your TV. It's cheap and tempting, but I'm gonna work with Boxee for right now. Ciao.