An antenna? If you don’t have a TV, you can get a tuner dongle and antenna for your PC and use VLC or other streaming video clients. Unfortunately, the services that take over-the-air signals and put them online usually get killed off by lawsuits. But tuner dongles and half decent, compact antennas are pretty cheap.
Unfortunately, the current state of the patent office is extremely understaffed and mostly nontechnical. So, there’s not enough qualified examiners to examine patents, not just in software, but medical devices, voting machines, and lots of other industries. So essentially if a patent is submitted by a major company, it just gets rubber stamped. And it’s up to the courts to sort it out. Unfortunately that sorting out is biased and understaffed, too, so usually the initial case will go to the patent holder by default and it’s not until an appeal or two on those biases and technical misinterpretations that it can be invalidated. So it’s rare for a smaller company to be able to spend that much money to invalidate an obvious idea like this. Of course this is by design to give large corporations an unfair advantage. If they want some tech, they just sue for a stupid patent, wait until the company either folds and then they can steal it legally, or goes bankrupt fighting it and they can acquire them hostilely.
Considering the community this is posted in, I think it’s fair to mention (if maybe not directly link to) there are devices that decode DRM and other encoding and pass on a stream that can be watched without needing all of that. The ones I saw were under $100. Though it’s definitely possible that these may get cracked down on eventually either by customs or changes in the DRM that requires internet connectivity to decode which has been discussed though seems dumb to need internet to watch a broadcast signal, but greed often causes stupid things like that.