I am very interested in all this. I desperately want to be a cable cutter, I am fed up of spending over $100 a week on Satellite for 200 channels of crud and six channels I actually watch. I am also an ex-pat and sorely miss my BBC fix and Radio 4 Panel shows. The future seems so close but it is still a swirling mess of almost-there solutions.
There are some great freeware solutions out there, as mentioned XBMC and all sorts of ways of making the Internet or downloaded content more transparent. The legitimate services like Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Vudu etc are close but no banana, content is still being jealously hoarded by the old media. The illegitimate services like Torrents, Usenet and streaming can work really well but I am a big girls blouse and would prefer to not have to so heavily rely on something illegal. There are some great devices, Roku, Tivo, Boxee and a emerging group of Android or Raspberry Pi based commercial implementations of XBMC.
All of it is close but won't mean anything until somebody comes up with the one-device-to-bind-them that my parents, my wife and the 12:00 blinking VCR people can cope with. It's all still way too techie. I enjoy it, but XBMC can be frustrating, along with all the backend, frontend and witsend apps like Sickbeard, tvheadend, mezzmo, etc, etc, etc. The killer app is not there yet, XBMC is close but still takes too much fishing around in wikis to make work properly. I no longer need a VPN thanks to Uno Telly but I suspect that DNS loophole may get closed sooner or later.
In my opinion you have to have one device as the portal to it all, that meets what the Cable Cutting websites call the Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF). For some people this is an Apple TV, a boxee or in my case a Tivo. I have a Antenna on my roof and a Tivo taking care of time shifting all the broadcast US TV. Up until recently all I had was a small footprint Shuttle XPC always on and connected directly by HDMI to the TV, serving torrent downloaded Brit TV to my Tivo with Streambaby. I can of course get to everything directly using a wireless mouse and Windows 7 on the PC, but I have found that doesn't meet the WAF. It is much more harmonious in the house if it all gets integrated together more or less seamlessly by the Tivo with no change of HDMI input required and One True Remote. This has its problems, Tivo has not kept up with the times well and their native apps are useless. There are a lot of free Apps out there though, like streambaby, that make it work the way it should. I don't think you can beat the Tivo as a DVR on the normal broadcast TV, plus it is a good portal to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and You Tube which it makes all searchable. However, if Boxee gets their act together and comes up with a decent Cloud DVR, or someone else does, then I think the Tivo is toast long term.
There are almost there solutions circling the vortex of confusion like Alki David's media defying Filmon.com which is bound to end up in the courts sooner or later. It very nearly does everything I want, including being able to record UK TV to the cloud. I think the cloud, or Video Napster II will eventually kill the DVR as it itself did the VCR.
Interesting times...meanwhile the MPAA/RIAA industry resists to the bitter end.
