Close your eyes. Clear your heart. Cut the cord.

So it's been 3 month since I unceremoniously dropped my grey cable box off at the Time Warner office, and it's been pretty great. Basically I looked at my pretty sweet Boxee set up on my mac mini and I decided I wanted to try and see if I could replace my expensive cable subscription with free offerings from the internet made available through Boxee. I already don't watch that many shows, so it really wasn't much to cover.

Official Sources
Hulu
SNL clips
30 Rock

CBS.com
How I Met Your Mother

Comedy Central
South Park

Joost
Adult Swim
United States of Tara

Netflix
(this basically takes the place of flipping through channels bored).
L&O reruns
Weeds back season

The rest of the shows are filled in via bittorrent, namely TVRSS which is sex on toast.

Unofficial Sources
Bittorrent
Gossip Girl
Big Love
Entourage

[UPDATE: I decided to take some pretty screenshots]

Once you find the feed you like, put it into your boxee profile (I have separate search feeds for each tv show I like. The metadata such as the image url is automatically added by boxee.


Select the episode you want to download. This list updates as the search feed adds info.


You can monitor all your downloads in a separate screen. This can happen in the background while you are watching other shows.


Once the show is downloaded, provided the episode is named in a conventional manner that boxee can recommend, it can automatically add metadata such as an episode title, number, description, and screengrab.

I like problem solving. I like looking at each unretrieved show as a project that can be quickly remediated. So here are the remaining issues I'm still working on:

Unresolved issues
Live events such as the Oscars or sports
Small market unsyndicated content

So the biggest gap for me personally has been small market shows that don't have enough traction to get torrented and seeded, and are not on distributed channels. This basically includes The Soup and The Millionaire Matchmaker. Try as I might, I can't find any channels to get my Patti fix. And that's a DEALBREAKER, ladies.