I once built a system that pulled multiple TV channels, encoded them on the fly and rebroadcast via multicast over the office LAN to reporter's desks. This was for a newsroom and would have otherwise required dozens of DVB cable drops (and subscriptions). The DirecTV guy was mighty suspicious that I had a pile of Linux boxes set up next to the receivers, and no TVs in sight.
I've heard a similar setup is similar in hotels. The hotel gets a box per channel, re-broadcasts them onto coax (same as VCRs used to put eveything on channel 3, but with more channels), and then the hotel TVs can use their built-in tuners.
It's even moving past that: the last hotel I was at used the TV as a thin client that transmitted incoming IR signals back to its box in the server room.
Needless to say, the latency was atrocious. I even saw a Windows desktop flicker during a channel change.
