Some TVs go directly online for streaming movies - NYTimes.com

For more than a decade, tech and media companies have wrestled with how to deliver digitized movies directly over the Internet to consumers: how do you get the copy-protected files from the computer to the big screen in the living room?

The early answers didn’t inspire many couch potatoes to get off the sofa. You could either plug a laptop computer into your TV set (assuming the computer and the television had the right connections) or buy a box, called a media extender, for your home theater that received streaming files from your computer. Media extenders proved obstreperous and confusing: some files wouldn’t play on some extenders, the boxes were awkward to set up and movie downloads were painfully slow...