Do you believe HOPE to be terribly expensive? It's $120 for several days, which I really wouldn't consider that expensive, and there are discounts for students and (I think) free for volunteers.
Being in NY makes accommodations expensive, but Hotel Pennsylvania rooms split a few ways aren't that bad.
My take on HOPE vs. CCC is that HOPE is much more explicitly political, especially outside security. 30c3 was pretty much the "CCC NSA event", though, which was unusual. Both are fun, but my favorite conferences are the Dutch HAL/HIP/OHM/etc., and USENIX Security. I have super high hopes for Real World Crypto NYC 13-15 JAN, and excited to speak at ShmooCon 17-19 JAN in DC.
C3 talks come in several varieties. There are hardcore tech talks about actually attacking and exploiting devices (security & safety) and more hardware-oriented talks about building things (hardware & making). Next you have lectures about general science and engineering. On the less technical side there is one track about ethics, society and politics and another one for art & beauty.
Apart from the talks there are usually workshops, special interest groups (knitting, BSDM,...) and dedicated space for socialising and collaborating with others on projects on site.
I've been to HOPE conferences in New York, fun but terribly expensive, these look similar but slightly more technical. I'd be interested in a comparison/contrast from people who've been to both HOPE and CCC cons.
The videos and the podcast feed for them can be fed into MIRO which will feed into my mythtv setup so I can watch them all at home. Unfortunately, I prefer listening to audio of conferences in my car, have done that for many years, and video isn't going to work, or at least would be tremendously wasteful. Perhaps there will be mp3 files and a podcast xml feed of them for the CCC presentations sooner or later.