The dirty little secret is that most of these channels are very cheap. The only expensive ones are ESPN and other sports programming. People who dont watch sports subsidize those that do.
I went off cable a year ago. The only thing I miss is ads for upcoming movies. Weird, right? Everything else I want I can get online, but I had come to depend on ads to tell me when a good movie was coming.
My girlfriend always seems to know the plot of every movie. For a while I was wondering when she was finding time to sneak off to the theater, and why she was doing it without me. Her secret was just that she watched just about every movie trailer at apple.com.
It's interesting to see the differences between major sports. It's trivial to replace your cable TV with online viewing for baseball, but impossible for american football.