WHAAT?.. 
I have found the pause feature in YouTube TV to save me. I pause it for 6 months after Football season in Jan. Restart it up and pay half the normal ridiculous charge.
And I was going to spend $$$$ just to watch FOX news that breaks into commercials every 2 mins, then I found them on youtube. Just when everybody is dumping FOX. and all the talents fleeing Fox. + you tube is free with little ad breaks.
There used to be a ‘must carry’ rule of the FCC whereby cable companys had to carry local channels.
"
FCC.GOV: This demand for carriage is commonly referred to as “must-carry.” If a broadcast station asserts its must-carry rights, it cannot demand compensation from the cable operator for carriage of its signal."
also: " Under the retransmission consent system, the cable company retransmits the broadcast station signal while often paying compensation to the broadcast station. (The must-carry system does not involve paying compensation.)"
I always figured if they really wanted you to watch something they would show it for free OTA.
Lavarock, I recall buying the poor mans package from the cable company back at the turn of the century for $20 a month. It was mostly just OTA stations. When cable first went digital it saved them all kinds of money transferring or delivering the data and they raised their price and even made more money off us. Very glad I am able to use that magic antenna and that most stations are on UHF.
Better still: Many dcades back, I had a home satellite dish. This was novel because the public generally didn’t, but I was a Ham and technical. My first one was a patio mount which had aluminum rods you adjusted for height and angle. I watched news directly from the network feeds. Also, most signals were in the clear, including HBO which shut down at midninght east coast time, WTBS, Showtime, The Movie Channel, etc. They soon decided to start encrypting signals but you could subscribe t oservices.
When I moved to Georgia around the time of the Olympics, I installed a bigger dish with actuator (think driveway gate fence closure thing) which would adjust the mesh antenna along the path as I changed channels. I was able to watch many channels all for free. In the end, I was able to watch hundreds of channels and even subscribed to many of the pay services: HBO, Showtime, TMC, WTBS, WGN and so on, also getting the wst coast feeds thrown in. That allowed you to watch a movie or show that just finished airing on the east coast. I also got raw news feeds before they wwre edited by the networks, I saw Star Trek, Newhart, The Wonder Years, etc. I had multiple news channels of the OJ trial which showed inside the courthouse, people in the hall outside, outside the courthouse itself and so on (it was like being there). I saw first hand how the news networks manipulated a story to get it on air.
All this stuff for about $350 a year! You could get all the free stuff, then pick and choose ala-carte or by packages, what channels you wanted to add. I wish I could find the old ads from the satellite magazine that showed what you got for next to nothing.