Streaming illegally will always be a nuisance. Downloading stuff illegally cannot be discussed here.
Your best bet is to go with stuff that costs money (one or a combination of services such as apple tv rentals, netflix, usa proxies for hulu) but based on your post you don't want to spend much money.
So short answer is no
Depending on where you live you can buy an over the air HDTV antenna from the dollar store and try that. They legally broadcast channels like CBC over the air.