While your ideas are certainly cost saving, be very careful you are being fair in your calculations.
What I mean is you may figure out you can save $20 a month in lowering your subscription costs but will require an initial outlay of cash in owned hardware to replace the service you are used to having. i.e. drop a DVR fee from Dishnetwork, only to spend $600 in new gadgets and software to have a convoluted system, awkward to work, soon to be a huge frustration.
What I have been doing here is determine what services and hardware I can do without by carefully analyzing my monthly usage. I found over $300 a month in bloated waste, by eliminating these, I find my lifestyle is not even affected.
I think your idea of dropping down a tier in the package may be worth it if the channels you normally watch are all in that lower tier and the additional ones in the 250 are rarely watched other than seeing them active in your channel guide. The later I could certainly do without and not even notice they were gone. IF you have 2+ DVRs now, keep at least one and lower your equipment leasing by replacing with simple one tuner receivers or run a coax for TV2 on the dual tuner DVR. If you need to record two at a time, then temporarily shut off your dual mode for that recording time, make the recording and then return to dual mode. A little effort can save a DVR and dual tuner fee we now have to pay.
You opened up with a statement of your primary lifestyle in rarely watching programs live. This means that DVR function is primary. Therefore you should not sell short the value in your budget of having the easiest and most versatile DVR in the business.
AS for the XBOX360, I can tell you that the xbox360 does a great job of serving wmv movies from my main computer over the ethernet but in SD only. I have not had any luck with serving 1080 x 1920 files. I also have a PS3 and it is better suited to surf the internet in my home theater, but I rarely do that since it's just easier to use a laptop. The PS3 was purchased mainly to play troubled BD that would not play in my Samsung player. But now I have an OPPO and it works as well as the PS3 playing Blu Ray so my PS3 rarely gets used these days. I have about 70 movies on my server that I can pull up with the XBOX360. I've done a few rendered for PS3 compatibility too but it is just redundant now to the XBOX360. When it comes to the technical side of serving media, I vote a tie for performance between the PS3 and the XBOX360. I have not done any actual TV services on a computer like a computer DVR so YOYO on that one.
