That's the number one reason I bought one of these HD Homerun cable tuner boxes[1]. Once I have a VLC playlist setup with the stream urls to each channel, switching channels is almost as fast as in the old days of analog cable TVs.

Maybe another 4 hours of work got me a little web application that shows the TV guide information pulled from an API, and is hooked in with the VLC web interface to switch channels with a click.

[1]http://amzn.to/1S6nHjA