I don't know what you are talking about, but I haven't had cable TV for 6 years. I have an old Pentium 3 computer in my basement running Azureus. Whenever I want to download a show, I just drop the torrent file on a share and it automatically imports and downloads. I currently have another computer in my living room connected to my HDTV. It has an ATI All-In-Wonder card with the Remote Wonder. I use the remote to open the shared folder of videos and play whatever one I want. It has served me well and requires zero maintenance.
However, it is not quite fast enough to play true 720p or higher due to being a plain Pentium 4 system. The Core2Duo Macs in my house are able to play everything up to 1080, so as soon as I spot the new model Mac Mini on the refurb store, I will be replacing the TV computer with that.