I'm a little surprised that you have to pay extra to your cable service to get the locals in HD - the basic digital cable package around here (which is all that I have) includes the major networks, Discovery, and TNT in HD without any extra, but then again every market does things a bit differently. I'd heard that satellite services tended to hit you with an extra to get HD. Hopefully at some point (as HDTV's continue to become more common and once analog channels are shut down) we'll see cable and satellite services offer more HD stations and at some point scale back on SD stations (set top boxes can downconvert anyway), at which point it'll be a bit harder to charge a premium for the HD service. There's also over-the-air HD, of course, which is free if you have a tuner. There seem to be more and more satellite receivers that are including over-the-air HD tuners. Maybe the end of analog will also bring some less expensive over-the-air HD tuners to market along with the digital boxes that will be required anyway, so folks with "HD-ready" displays can have over-the-air HD as an easier option.