Sup­pose you want­ed to have free TV. Sup­pose by that you mean se­ries, not movies or news (both of which you can get in oth­er ways).

Al­so, sup­pose you want to have it on your ac­tu­al TV. Al­so, that you don't mind break­ing IP laws. Well, this is how I would do it, if that was the case.

First: get hard­ware.

You need a gen­er­al com­pu­ta­tion­al de­vice with TV con­nec­tors and lots of stor­age. Like, say, a Mele A1000 or A2000 run­ning an­droid, and a SA­TA disk. This will cost you around $150 or so.

The Mele has HD­MI, VGA and com­pos­ite, so it can con­nect to pret­ty much any­thing that can dis­play im­ages. You could even use a 64GB SD card in­stead of a SA­TA drive if you want to go cheap­er.

Sec­ond: choose some se­ries.

You could go to ShowRSS cre­ate an ac­count and just choose se­ries you like. ShowRSS would then pro­vide you with a nice RSS feed up­dat­ed as your shows are up­load­ed.

You could even choose be­tween SD and HD ver­sion­s.

Third: get the episodes.

You would need a Bit­Tor­rent client that sup­ports this:

1. An­­droid.

2. Choos­ing the des­ti­­na­­tion fold­er (u­­Tor­rent for an­­droid does­n't)

3. RSS Feeds with autodown­load

For ex­am­ple: aD­own­load­er

If you are us­ing the Mele and the SA­TA drive, there is a bug in aD­own­load­er where it can't write to the SA­TA disk. You can fix it if you have root and some pa­tience.

Fourth: get a good video play­er.

You want one that:

1. Has HW de­­cod­ing

2. Has SW au­­dio de­­cod­ing (a mele-spe­­cif­ic is­­sue)

3. Sup­­ports many video for­­mats

4. Sup­­ports sub­­ti­tles, if you need them

For ex­am­ple: MX Play­er

Fifth: get sub­ti­tles.

If you ev­er watch some­thing that is not in your na­tive lan­guage, you al­so want some­thing that au­to­mat­i­cal­ly gets sub­ti­tles for your videos. For ex­am­ple Subload­er

How well would this work? Well, it would take rough­ly 5 min­utes to down­load a show in SD or 15 min­utes to down­load it in HD on a 10Mbps in­ter­net link.

It would let you play them in your own time.

It would let you see shows be­fore they air in your coun­try, and even if they will nev­er air there.

It is al­so il­le­gal as all hel­l, so don't do it.