Welcome to the party. These 3 are the backbone of streaming (NETFLIX, HULU, AMAZON PRIME). Netflix and Amazon are in a content war which benefits the consumer as both have good new stuff. Amazon is currently showing a large number of HBO Series. Hulu I dumped because I can’t see paying for something chock full of commercials that expects you to watch something in a week or two. If you are okay with that, they will keep you up on most current TV series. All of these are about $10 a month. Amazon is also useful for buying TV series and streaming them when they go on sale.
Local TV was very close with Aereo, but it got shot down. A good HD Antenna can get that for you but a streaming cloud based local service for urban areas is the future. HBO and CBS have recently indicated they are going streaming so this is the crack in the dam for cable providers. Showtime is now matching HBO. Red Box also tried to get into this but couldn’t make it work. All in all you have to work a little harder, but you get to watch what you want when you want on any device that streams. Cable is an endangered species.
Finally, cloud streaming handles most stuff, but you can even build your own media streaming library by ripping your DVD/Blue Ray collection. Most devices now support various media servers for this. The last nut to crack is setting up a DVR like service for anything you pull over an antenna, but default Windows handles that with a little effort. With your new found savings it is easy to experiment with hardware and services and still come out ahead.
I have been collecting TV shows for a long while. I put them on an NAS External Hard Drive (WiFi). I also have WD TV box that can read the NAS drive and play the contents. I also use PLEX software that runs through WD TV and ROKU.
Now, I can ‘process’ a tv show (cut out commercials, etc), put it on the NAS drive and view it on the LCD TV.
TVs and Computers can finally talk to each other.