What are alternatives to EyeTV for watching live TV

No this unicorn doesn't exist. I was looking to revamp my MacMini/EyeTv setup earlier this year and looked around quite a bit at alternatives. What I found was that cable and dish DVR's have pretty much destroyed the computer hobby market for TV along with DRM licensing costs.

I think the closest you're going to get are the boxes from SiliconDust or Hauppage. Both have DVR and sharing abilities, but their software is a bit more high maintenance than EyeTV's to achieve most of your programming goals.

I finally decided to stick with EyeTV for my DVR and live viewing. Fingers crossed that they will keep the software updated. I use the TitanTV program guide to manually schedule recordings. EyeTV still does an excellent job of exporting programs for archiving. Good luck finding auto commercial removal, the last company to try that, Replay, was sued out of existence.