I live in the S.F. Bay area, and have had Dish since '97, with distants grandfathered in since the beginning. After getting "the letter", I've been wringing my hands trying to figure out which I want in my heart of hearts. I love being able to watch 10:00 p.m. "primetime" shows at 7:00 p.m., and watch Letterman @ 8:35 p.m. On the other hand, I also like local news, sports and weather (duhhh...). I sent requests for waivers to my 4 local network affiliates on Saturday, and today a fella from the ABC affiliate in S.F. calls and says that they have gotten thousands of waiver requests, and denied every one of them. He said that essentially the wording of the waiver would be "KGO waives the right for KGO to be my exclusive source of ABC content", and he said that will never happen. In addition, he said that I had better be very careful, that I may indeed choose the distants as my choice for network feeds, and come April 17th, they will be cut off anyway. If I get waivers from Fox, CBS and NBC, I'd be fine with it, since I don't really watch any ABC programming (except "Boston Legal"), but what if they all come back with that same type of response? This is nuts...I want my distants; I cannot receive over-the-air signals; and I refuse to let Comcast into my house ever again. Along with this, if I keep my distants only, and lose my locals package with Dish, I also lose about 20 other stations that are also in the local package, so it's quite a big deal to lose your locals...you lose them ALL! Isn't this the age of choice? The ABC local guy told me that this obviously is all about ad revenues and marketing clout. Wonderful; I'm a guy who skips over all the commercials with my PVR721 100% of the time, so for that I've got to make a choice on distants vs. locals? What are you guys doing out there?