Watching cable tv on the macbook

I see plenty of forums about connecting the macbook to your tv, but I'd like to use the macbook AS a tv. My buddy, who is a PC guy, has his cable (tv connection) plugged into his pc and can watch the cable channels on his monitor. The instructions I found online for how to hook this up mentioned that it doesn't work for a mac. Is this true? Is there a way to watch the cable channels on my macbook? I don't have a tv, and it seems some adapter to get the channels on my computer would be cheaper than buying one.

What might be of interest if don't want to be limited to free TV:
http://www.terratec.net/en/products/TerraTecH791101.html?premium=1
I'm using this Terratec H7 myself including payTV Channels. It's capable of HDTV reception, but this requires the additional purchase of ElGato EyeTV 3 full version; the included EyeTV Lite is only capable of SDTV.

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