Depends who your cable company is. Id recomend going with them since their is no upfront costs, no contracts and so on. You can enjoy your cable see how you like it and if not you can always change to one of the sat providers and not pay any early termination fee like you would with one of the *'s
I did what you suggest: have been with Comcast for the last year and have enough of them for the following reasons:
1. Comcast DVR (moto 6412) is the worst junk I've seen in years (ignores my commands or executes with a few seconds delay, freezes, reboots, shuts of my sharp LCD TV in a middle of play back etc.). A BIG disappointment after great previous experience with tivo s2/direct TV;
2. Comcas does not provide logical search (cannot search by title, director etc.) through their "on demand" offerings.
I'm investigating the following solutions (I think movie/content download from a searchable databases is a better solution than recording broadcast):
3. Wait (in Silicon Valley) for tivo hd software to run on moto hardware 6412. I read on this board that Comcast starts a field trial in MA in 8/2007 and will take another few months to roll out elsewhere in US;
4. Replace Comcast DVR with $299 Tivo s3 HD DVR with "unbox"/Amazon downloads (no access to Comcast "on demand"). Questions: will the new SDV by Comcast be incompatible wit Tivo s3?
5. Sign with E*/vip722.
How does the vip722 user interface compare to tivo s3?
How do E* "pay per view" offerings compare to Amazon unbox?