[Jeffhs]

Like it or not, it's a sign of the times. Free TV will disappear in the US eventually, just as VHS was made obsolete by DVDs, and the latter will become obsolete in a very short time as well, being upstaged by such new technologies as streaming video and the like. Technology is moving at breakneck speed these days; consider the joke, made popular back in the early days of the Internet, about computers becoming obsolete the minute you leave the store with the machine under your arm. It's not a joke anymore, if it ever was in the first place.

Television, video and audio technologies are evolving at a dizzying rate; unfortunately, there's not a darn thing we can do to slow it down or outright stop it, short of learning to live with it. There was an article in Popular Science magazine that predicted some or most TV stations may eventually go off the air and move to cable; this was in the mid-1970s or thereabouts. Today, however, we have reached that point, where some stations, and even entire networks, may abandon over-the-air broadcasting and turn to cable exclusively. The day when entire cities are wired for cable is finally here, and as I said, OTA television's days are numbered.