In the living room, hooked on pay TV

New York: It is a fantasy shared by many Americans: dropping cable television and its fat monthly bill and turning instead to the wide-open frontier of Internet video.

Some are finding that the reality is not that simple.

Just ask Bill Mitchell, a 40-year-old engineer in Winston-Salem, N.C. He canceled his Time Warner cable service and connected his flat-panel television to the Internet to watch sitcoms and his other favorite shows, using products from Apple and Boxee.