I'm watching this thread closely as I like things to just work.
When Verizon FIOS started to drop my cable card support I did an evaluation of options. I had a rather premium and legacy and discontinued plan for FIOS. I did the following:
Made a spreadsheet up of what channels and we I watch and prioritized them.
Then I looked at different ways to receive them and the costs. My conclusion was that an antenna and streaming got me most of what we watch for much less per month. I use SLM to integrate our streaming into Channels and this is great having everything in one place. When installed the antenna I was amazed to see that there are 90 broadcast channels in NYC and that FIOS was only providing about a dozen of them. There are multiple movie channels broadcast in NYC providing many of the classic movies that we can also get via Fast Channels. I'm now paying $100 less per month for equal to better content. There are a few shows I'm missing and looking for reasonably priced ways to get them and that's my interest in the encoder projects.