Comcast is "upgrading" my neighborhood to replace most of the SD analog channels with digital variants, thus opening up more spectrum on the cable for more channels. I had an unhelpful phone call with the Comcast customer service agent, leaving me unclear on some of the particulars. Time to ask the Best and Brightest.

We have three TV sets in the house. One has a TiVo with a CableCard. The other two are just plugged directly into the raw cable. The latter two TVs pick up the analog channels and a damn near useless subset of the digital ones. (It annoys me that the local OTA HD channels aren't available in the clear on my cable.) Since those TVs are only used occasionally, I'm uninterested in spending $8.50/month (per TV) for HD converter boxes.

In the new world order, I fear that _all_ the new digital channels will be encrypted. Comcast has helpfully, and for free, offered to ship me two "digital adapters", which (I believe) don't have digital output and don't do high-def. That's lame. I want an alternative.

Way back when, my dad bought two Sharp LCD TVs that had built-in CableCard slots. Great concept. Recently, he actually tried to set one up that way, after his cable went from analog to digital, and it turns out that the TV only ever knew how to deal with S-cards, and Comcast only now offers M-cards. And, so far as I can tell, there's no such thing as a current HDTV set that has a built-in CableCard slot.

Ideally, I'd like to buy a cheap CableCard-compatible tuner, stick it next to each TV, and get Comcast to give me some extra CableCards (which, I hope, are cheaper than $8.50/mo.).

The closest I've been able to find is a HDHomeRun Prime box (for $200), which then dumps TV signals onto my LAN. One of the two aforementioned TVs has an Xbox 360 on it, so that could (allegedly) display the video coming out of the HDHomeRun Prime, although I hate to have that thing on for TV watching since the fan makes such a racket. And then, for the other TV, I'd have to buy some other sort of Media Center Extender. Since I don't have a Windows 7 Media Center (nor particularly want to buy one), this just doesn't seem like the right way to go. (If there was a sub $100 box that could act like a set-top box and connect to the HDHomeRun, that might be attractive.)

The other alternative, which might actually be the right answer, is to stick an old-fashioned antenna on the roof (can't do it in the attic since we have a radiant barrier), and route that to the two TVs in question. That would mean that we'd only have OTA, but it would be HD and it wouldn't require set-top boxes or monthly fees.

My true "dream" alternative would be the TiVo Premiere Q / Preview combo, but those are only offered through RCN.

So... am I missing any options?