Online Entertainment
Before I was going to kick cable I had to find a way to get the shows. You can find pretty much any show online somewhere my goal was to get the most in one spot. I looked in a few places. Network websites, YouTube, Hulu, Netflix and Fancast. I've not done much with Fancast yet but will look into it more soon.Hulu held the bulk of the shows. For many of them you can only watch the 5 most recent. Once they expire, they're gone. So it's close, but not quite what I'm used to with a DVR. YouTube had a couple that Hulu was missing - New episodes of Bleach and The Guardian Spirit are from the Cartoon Network and are heavily protected. As far as I can tell the YouTube posts are legal, but who knows.
The only missing part was Smallville and One Tree Hill. Both are on the CW and they hang on to their shows. The only place I can see them is on cable or on the CW site. The CW has a crummy site though and it doesn't function well for watching shows. As a result I've let those shows drift out of my usual set to watch. Both of them jumped the shark (One Tree Hill jumped ahead 5 years, and Smallville had Clark becoming more overt about his abilities) recently so it's not a huge loss.
Now the old episodes of shows are tricky. Some are on Hulu, but it's not consistent. So this is where Netflix comes into play. Netflix has a rather inexpensive plan where you can get one DVD at a time sent to you. In addition you can a substantial number of shows and movies online. Out of this, if I want to watch old shows, I can get them in full as long as they have a DVD.