Anyone look into a Slingbox? We live overseas and use one and love it. After the initial hardware purchase, there is no cost at all, hough we send my parents $12 w month, which is what hey pay their cable company for an extra cable box with DVR.
Basically, a Slingbox takes the cable and puts it on the internet. You log on to your Slibgbox account and an image of the remote that looks almost exactly like the real remote appears on top of the image from the cable box (which can be a world away), and you click the buttons just as you would push them in person, to control the TV. Your TV screen acts as a monitor.
If the person hosting your Slingbox has fancy sports packages and premium channels, you would have access to that content. You can even use pay per view, or anything that you could do if you were at their home and watching from the cable box in person.
No idea of the legal issues, if there are any, but we've been very pleased with it.