>Torrenting and maintaining the software to play movie files on my TV takes time

I've never thought either of those things took much time or effort. Though admittedly I've never timed myself doing it.

For new people getting into it, there are quite a few traps that make it really easy to download malware or sign up for phony services pretending to be popular torrenting sites. As with all things, it's easy once you know how to do it, but the learning curve has gotten trickier over time as search engines have been flooded with malicious misdirections that no one seems incentivized to clean up.

Jellyfin had been great for me, but the setup for jellyfin and the optional niceties like homeserver with NFS, auto download new episodes, Socks5 VPN proxy, subtitles, remote control, getting jellyfin on each TV, etc. definitely looks daunting to the outsider. I've gone all the way with everything I've mentioned, and IMO is worth it. After initial setup, it's been low maintenance. My next upgrade will probably be to replace my NUC with a formal RAID setup like synology, but I haven't filled my current drives yet.

To be honest all you need is a torrent client, HDMI cable and a laptop. Not much time required. With slightly more effort you can even intall Plex or Jellyfin on your laptop, and stream directly to your smart tv.