You can't actually stream any other major pro sport in your local market you only get out of market games (ie no Giants baseball in the Giants territory - and the territory extends north to oregon and about 300 miles south of SF)

Here's the funny thing - you generally don't need cable to watch your local NFL team. You can actually usually get your local NFL team using an over the air HD antenna and if you get a decent signal you can get pretty good HD. This is because most NFL games air on local broadcast affiliates which still transmit an OTA signal. Most of the other sports games are on local cable nets.

So really NFL is actually the only sport where you can get a local game feed without cable. So to answer the article's premise - no.

"Last year's blackouts were confined to five teams, all of which had losing records: the Jacksonville Jaguars (seven blackouts, seven wins); Detroit Lions (four blackouts, two wins); Kansas City Chiefs (one blackout, four wins); Oakland Raiders (seven blackouts, five wins); and St. Louis Rams (three blackouts, one win)."

Mark Cuban had a good piece on this subject a year ago, still rings true:

http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2009/03/25/mrk-cuban:-cable-tv-...

This is supported by the rise of DVRs, allowing people to choose when they want to view their content without delving into the online realm of Hulu, Netflix, etc.

The problem right now is that none of the major online streamers have really good integration into any TV set. There also does not exist a good discovery system ("you like House? You might also like...") for anyone except Netflix, and they're more of a movie house than a television one.

In contrast, Netflix gives me a full HD video of exactly what I want to watch, when I want to watch it, with no ads. It's better even than a DVD, because the DVD forces me to sit through a bunch of copyright warnings, logos for the distributor, and half the time a main menu which wants to show me fifteen seconds of clips from the movie before I can press play.

As someone who recently moved from Time Warner Cable to U-Verse, U-Verse (which is an entirely multicasted IPTV system) is substantially faster than TWC in terms of channel acquisition speed — it's literally instantaneous. I suspect a lot of that has to do with Time Warner's increasing use of switched digital video rather than encrypted QAM, but that certainly isn't going to change anytime soon.

Caveats: (1) It's only for broadcast channels at this point; (2) it's unclear that what they do is legal, but they believe that it is and appear to be litigating this point.

Sure, I don't have cable TV, and I get most of my video-watching via the internet. Where do I get my internet access from? Why, Comcast, the only provider of high-speed internet in my area.

If everybody starts getting all their TV through the internet, what will Comcast do? They'll start charging everybody a lot more for internet access in order to make up the lost revenue. For the moment, though, I'm flying under the radar, getting my internet and all the video I can watch for less than the cost of basic cable TV. I'd like to keep it that way. Therefore, sssshhh!

The one factor that cable companies can rely on is that they have positioned themselves to be the primary ISP for a good portion of the US population. It will be interesting to watch how/if these companies pivot in the next few years.

Funny thing is...I'd pay for both MNF and Dexter a la cart on iTunes/Amazon if it we're available. As it stands, neither networks get any of my money. But the local bars do :)

I think the NFL has the tendency to sign big exclusivity contracts, given that the only way to watch out of market games is through DirecTV.

http://espn.go.com/espnnetworks/index