As of right now, I think the only (legal) way to do this, is to integrate with your STB. In a lot of cases you can really make the integration pretty good, using serial connection instead of IR, or in some cases firewire.
Write to your congressman and tell them your upset with the disgrace that's been made of cablecard, and tired of the media providers disobeying FCC regulations and federal fair-use rights laid out in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The FCC did, after all, order all these companies to make available a standardized method of accessing their content without using the STB.
You can also likely get alot of these channels OTA with a Sat card, but it's more along the lines of illegitimately decrypting the data I think. And under current laws purchased from our congressmen by the media companies, any act of decrypting material is illegal.