Steve O'Hear has been pondering the future of Internet TV and he sees set-top boxes as the key hardware item to deliver internet tv to your home theater.



A set-top box is the device that will be connected to the Internet and used in conjunction with a TV will deliver broadband speed TV signals to your home theater.

A number of online services are now positioning themselves to provide online TV, such as Joost, Microsoft and others.

I think it is early days to really say how Internet TV is going to be delivered to your home theater as there are a number of conflicting hardware and software systems being brought to market. I personally consider that a PC should be connected to your home theater TV set and allow you the choice to be able to browse to your TV site, like Joost, and run software provided by that site to deliver a signal to your TV.