Thanks for your replies everyone.
Following Adam's suggestion, I looked into the antennae broadcasts, but like jostenmeat said it wouldn't get me the Nuggets as I found out. Plenty of college football, college basketball, and mexican soccer, but no NBA games.
DirectTV has a cable package that
does include the Altitude channel for about $40/month, although I haven't looked at the fine print yet so I don't know if the rate will jack up after a 6-month trial period like I know other providers do. Also the physical cable jack is in an awkward place and is
not where the TV and 5.1 system is set up, so I don't know how to go about getting the cable jack installed to the other wall. I don't trust a cable provider setup guy to not make a destructive mess out of that.
...still sucks that in 2012 there doesn't exist an alternative to signing up with a traditional subscriber for a package deal just to get ONE channel. Again, Netflix streaming seems to work well; why can't I just contact the Altitude channel directly and pay to stream their channel from my computer, and output the A/V signal to my TV and cut out the middle man? Seriously, in 2012? Surely the technology to do that is here, is it just being stopped by an impenetrable wall of lawyers?