There's a ton of connected TV's which do this. Samsung/LG/Sony - they all are playing in this space.

The big downside is that right now most of the TV chipsets (outside of the latest models) are severely underpowered, and no one wants to upgrade a TV, when they can upgrade a box for about 10-20% the price.

If you want a TV with all the cool interactive bells and whistles wait for the TV's which can run full flash 10.1 - not so much for the flash, but so you know you have something that will be able to handle much of what's being thrown at it.

If you need any of

* MKV support

* 1080p support

* Subtitles (.sub/.idx/.srt)

* Remote control

XBMC on a Gen 1 Apple TV with a Crystal HD card is pretty simple to get going, and has decent performance.

I've tried:

* Gen 1 XBox running XBMC (no 1080p on a Celeron)

* XBox 360 with WMC (flakey codec support, requires separate Windows PC, no subtitle support, remote control via Media Control is bad). Microsoft fluffed this one so bad. All the codec packs for it require you hacking your standalone host system to bits to get playback working.

* DLNA on my Sony Bravia to PlayOn. PlayOn sucks, to put it kindly. Still requires a seperate standalone PC.

In 2008, XBMC streaming over SMB directly from a NAS was the answer.

It still is, if you don't want to muck around for hours fiddling trying to get stuff going by following the cargo cultish forums that exist for video playback (blind leading the blind).

My Samsung TV has most (if not all) of that, and already has Hulu Plus.

And Hulu Plus was a huge disappointment. For those that don't know, ONLY 'plus' content can be streamed to a device directly. You can't watch the vast majority of Hulu's catalog directly on your TV/PS3/whatever. It cost me $10 to learn that.

Apple has missed a trick it should have learned from the iPhone in the value of allowing controlled third party apps on to a platform. Apple TV + downloadable/purchasable iOS apps aimed solely for TV use would be awesome. Or maybe they're hoping to pull the same idea off using the iPad->Airplay->Apple TV integration coming later in the year?

The funny thing about buying a TV roughly every two decades (currently a twelve year old Sony Trinitron is doing its duty) is that I just don’t know that there are TVs which can do that.

It seems that TVs have turned into twins of the bloated laptops Sony likes to sell. I’m not sure whether I like that. Is that software at least user friendly?

It is obvious that Apple's direction is streaming. Streaming from the cloud is easily done. Streaming from users content is via AirPlay. Apple probably looked at DLNA. It looks unlikely that AirPlay will support 'non-Apple' format such as divx, mkv, flac. And I hope Apple will change its mind. It is not a Flash vs non-Flash issue.

Will Apple TV turns into an app & games platform? I see alot of pluses. Something not in the interactive TV as we know today. I think this is coming, based on what Google is doing. Google probably has some inside info that Apple is developing such, thus Google is developing its own Google TV to compete. But I think Apple's implementation will be something different. Maybe: using your iPad/iPhone as controller, select the game you want to display on your TV and push it via AirPlay, the game will then load and play on Apple TV. Then you use your iPad/iPhone as controller to play the game.

This sounds like he is the kind of guy who in less than a year will be writing about how he wished he owned one and will be first in line for the next revision later blogging about how awesome it is.

My Sony TV is just a TV, and that is the way I like it, no apps, no internet; just channel buttons. Currently I am watching "Starwars II: Attack of the clones" in high def and commenting on this post at the same time.

Two screens are a far better experience than trying to both large video and interactive apps in one device. This is one of the reasons that interactive TV has never taken off. It just isn't feasible for general consumption.

"AirPlay (which is kind of cool but inherently flawed in the fact that when I switch it to the TV from say my iPad, I’d like to use the iPad for some other task.)"

By the time this comes to the iPad, it'll be iOS 4.2 which probably means they've designed this as a background task, which would allow you to do other stuff on your iPad.

There's a company called PlayOn. They use DLNA to stream things like Netflix, Hulu, and your files to DLNA capable devices. DLNA is actually built into 8,000+ devices such as XBOX,PS3, and some of these snazzy new TVs. PlayON is installed on one computer and then streams the rest. Is anyone here well versed in DLNA?

Does it seem to anyone else that he has missed a few other service integrations that Apple mentioned?

Now, I'll give you that the Sony TV probably is capable of more, but I thought the Apple device was going to do YouTube and Flickr at least.

Apple TV is an experiment. They're trying to find a market fit, so to speak. If you're comparing anything Apple is doing to an existing product, you're looking at it the wrong way.

These are my thoughts on this topic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1660396

but the guy has an iPhone 4 instead of an android phone...