This chart for AT&T U-Verse internet makes no sense whatsoever. For one, what's the difference between "watching TV/video clips" and "streaming video" and why does one need just 12 measly megabits, while the other needs 18? Also, the numbers just don't work. Even full HD 1080p streaming video through Zune on Xbox Live just requires 10Mbps-12Mbps of bandwidth.

If anything, it's the internet gaming that needs 12Mbps, as I was sadly reminded while trying to download the entirety Left 4 Dead 2 over the 6Mbps AT&T DSL I've got in GA—the fastest internet AT&T will give me. I'd console myself with Hulu, but you know, it might not work. [AT&T, Thanks Slacker!]

Basically, PlayonHD Mini is a smaller version of A.C. Ryan's original HD media player, but it doesn't sacrifice much other than an internal drive bay and a card reader. It doesn't seem like a bad deal overall, unless you compare it to a full-featured HTPC. [A.C. Ryan and Engadget]

So far, they've got this going for a few hundred titles it looks like, and it's restricted to the US, but hopefully it grows. (And hopefully, they'll stop being stingy with the high def streams.) Just look for the Disc+ on Demand logo on movie pages to see if it's eligible. [Amazon via NewTeeVee]

Ustream has had an official iPhone app available for a while now, but due to Apple's strict policies users could only upload video online after filming was finished—ie, not live at all. Enabling live streaming video from your iPhone to the internet, it works over a 3G connection and can update Twitter/Facebook etc of your live-streaming status.

You've probably seen updates from friends before, using Ustream or Qik on other devices (or jailbroken iPhones), but this week's app launch is big news for anyone who's been following the live-streaming video debacle.

If you're tossing up whether to download Live Knocking Video or Ustream, well, they're both free—but otherwise we'd suggest going for the latter as it has one major advantage over Knocking, the ability to stream video to the internet, rather than purely to another iPhone. Of course, you can't ignore Knocking's developer's gall, emailing Steve Jobs himself to get his app approved. [Ustream via TechCrunch]

I say that because HTPCs have never been smaller, cheaper or more powerful. A little over two years ago, we were talking about how purchasing an HD-capable PC would leave you with an empty bank account. Take this Sony Vaio TP1 for example. The wheel of cheese design was considered compact and "living room friendly" at the time, but it is still probably twice as big as current nettop models. The specs are lacking even by 2007 standards and it started at $1600. Today I can easily go out and find a more powerful, feature rich nettop for less than $400. And it would be small enough to tuck behind your HDTV due, in part, to cheap, compact, graphics-friendly chipsets like Nvidia Ion.

Today's Most Affordable HTPCs

Seriously...HTPCs for less than $400. Sure, you could spend a lot of cash on something more elaborate, and will have to if you want to access your own digital cable stream, or if you want to go with Blu-ray as your high-def source of choice, but if you simply want a compact 1080p device that competently opens up the entire internet to your HDTV, here is a good place to start:

• Dell Zino HD: The cheapest of the bunch at a base price of $230, the Dell Zino HD offers a range of AMD Athlon processor options, up to a 1TB HDD, up to 8GB of RAM and a choice between integrated graphics and an ATI Radeon HD 4330 512MB card. Plus you get HDMI, four USB ports, and two eSATA for easy expansion. Even with a few bells and whistles like a dual-core processor, a bump in RAM to 4GB or a boost in the HDD capacity, you can keep the Zino under $400. Adding a Blu-ray drive bumps the price up an additional $100. [Dell]

• Acer AspireRevo R6310: Features include a dual-core 1.6GHz Atom 330 processor, Nvidia Ion graphics, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, HDMI, eSATA, VGA, 6 USB ports, card reader and wireless-N in a $330 package. They even throw in a wireless keyboard and mouse for good measure. I have spent some time with the AspireRevo, and I can say that it is a very capable HTPC for the money. Power web surfing can be sluggish at times, as is Flash playback—but Adobe has promised support for NVIDIA graphics acceleration in Flash 10.1 that should remedy that situation. All-in-all though, it handles video quite well. It does not include optical drive option, meaning you will have to purchase a Blu-ray player seperately. [Acer]

• Asus EeeBox EB1012: A release date and price have not officially been confirmed, but the EeeBox EB1012 offers basically the exact same feature set as the AspireRevo—minus a USB port or two. Hopefully, when it is released, the price point will be even more aggressive than Acer's. It does not include optical drive option, meaning you will have to purchase a Blu-ray player separately. [Asus]

As a side note, if you are interested in using a CableCard tuner to turn your PC into a cable DVR, that has become a lot easier for the average Joe. However, programs like Comcast's upcoming Xfinity (formerly known as TV Everywhere) might easily bridge this gap by putting your current cable subscription online. Check out my article on living without cable or satellite to learn more about what programming and software is available to you online.

Remotes

None of the HTPCs mentioned above come with a remote control out of the box, but this can be easily and cheaply remedied. Most infrared remotes require only that you have a free USB port for the included adapter, so just about any PC with Windows Media Center can be converted to work with a remote.

If you are just looking for something basic, a remote like the MCE PC will do the job just fine—and it costs under $20. If you have an iPhone, you can also download apps like AirMouse (iTunes link) and MediaMote (iTunes link) to handle these tasks. Gmote is also available for those of you with Android phones.

Networking

Keep in mind that if your modem is far from your computer, and you'll be relying on Wi-Fi to connect to the internet and move files between computers, you are probably going to want something capable of handling wireless-N (802.11n). Fortunately, all of the PCs mentioned above can do that right out of the box—although the Dell Zino requires a $45 upgrade for that option.

If you want to upgrade an older PC to handle wireless-N, all you need is a compatible router and a USB adapter. Decent wireless-N routers will run you about $60 on the lower end, and compatible USB adapters can be had for an additional $30 or $40 bucks. If you just plan on connecting to the internet and you live in a smaller home or apartment, you should be fine with 802.11g.

Networked Storage

Although not an essential component to owning an HTPC, at some point you are probably going to want a networked storage solution so you can dump all of your files in one place. Traditionally, setting up a home server to centrally store files from multiple computers (and multiple platforms, potentially) required another major investment, but things have definitely improved in this area. For example, HP's LX195 Windows Home Server with a 640GB drive can be had for $250, and it performs quite well for the price. The same can be said for the Iomega Ix2-200 NAS. It runs on Iomega's proprietary software as opposed to Windows Home Server, but for the money, it has a killer feature set that makes it a pretty awesome deal. Capacity runs up to 4TB, but the base delivers 1TB at $270 and it is user-expandable.

Even if you want to bake your own NAS server there is open-source software like FreeNAS that can help to keep the costs down. Maximum PC has provided a great guide to building a NAS server using these free open source tools. If you have the hardware lying around, it's not going to cost a penny. Either way, building from scratch can be fairly inexpensive depending on how much storage space you need.

Avoid Expensive Set-Top Boxes

Amusingly enough, as I was writing this article, my father called to ask me about the Roku player his IT guy was raving about. Yes, Roku's three models are priced between $80 and $130, a figure even the cheapest HTPCs can't match, but the fact that they are still limited to Netflix and Amazon On Demand makes them less valuable. Would you say that Netflix and Amazon VOD are worth $130 of the AspireRevo's $330 price tag? I should hope not.

There are certainly good reasons to pick up a $100 HD media streamer, like the Asus O!Play, if you're aware of the limitations, but what's the excuse for Apple TV and others like it? Apple's set-top box costs $229. I have iTunes on my HTPC...so where is the value? Throw an HDMI port on a Mac Mini and then we'll talk. The $300 Popcorn Hour player may play a ton of file formats and have an integrated BitTorrent client, but you have to pay extra to add a hard drive, and by the time you do, you're squarely in HTPC territory.

To me, spending a little more actually saves money, because I don't need to buy so many competing boxes. It's like going to the grocery store and choosing between the regular-sized bag of coffee and the jumbo bag of coffee. The smaller bag costs lest money, but buying in bulk is cheaper pound for pound—and you know I will be drinking all of that coffee.

HTPCs Are Resilient

Forget about netbooks and elaborate set-top media boxes this holiday season. If your budget is anywhere over $300, go with an HTPC. Set-top boxes will always hold you to whatever content deals their makers can set in place (or whatever you can go through the trouble of hacking or modding in, yourself). And I'm not interested in netbooks until they handle HD well enough to be used as a portable HTPC.

It's only a matter of time before everyone watches TV through the internet, so you had better get on the bandwagon while cable companies are still scrambling to figure out how best to screw you. No matter how weird it gets, at least with a PC you know you'll be able to roll with it.

First, let's look at what Lala is. (Or was.) It's three things, really: A CD trading site (its original emphasis), a streaming site, where you can "upload" your own music and stream it anywhere (your collection is matched with what Lala's got, and anything they don't have is actually uploaded); and a streaming site that'll let you stream a song once for free, or pay 10 cents to stream it an unlimited number of times. In other words, It's a music service that's all about streaming and the cloud, both for the music you already own, and for finding and playing new music.

That obviously looks a lot different from iTunes—you pay for things, you download them, you have a library of stuff. It's kind of a dated, restrictive model, really. Only being able to listen to the small slice of music that's banked on my hard drive, it feels cramped and very 2004. Zune feels like a generation ahead with Zune Pass, which essentially expands my library ad infinitum, with full access to most of the service's 6 million songs (plus I get to keep 10 a month, so the pass just about pays for itself). iTunes needs to refresh itself.

Okay, so Lala obviously fits into that need. But what's Apple going to do with it specifically? Bring Lala under iTunes? Kill Lala and assimilate its features into iTunes? Keep Lala running? Well, there's actually some pretty good case studies when it comes to Apple buying up smaller companies, historically, especially when it comes to iPod and iTunes.

iTunes actually began life as an acquisition. In 2000, Apple was looking to buy MP3 software and wound up purchasing a little program called SoundJam MP, along with its lead developer, Jeff Robbin—it was re-engineered into what you now know as iTunes, and Robbin is now the VP for consumer applications at Apple. Cover Flow, which is now slathered on top of basically every app Apple makes, was originally an independent program developed by Steel Skies. Apple bought Cover Flow, though not the company. The iPod itself was mostly developed by a company called PortalPlayer—again, Apple bought the rights to the hardware and software, but not the company (which was later picked up by Nvidia).

Finally, and most recently, Apple bought PA Semi, an entire chip company, likely so Apple can design its own chips for iPhones and iPods (we haven't seen the fruits of this venture yet, though we likely will soon). So, there's a couple different models here: Buy the tech, buy the brains behind it; buy the tech; buy the company, the tech and the brains. In each instance, though, the thing purchased became wholly an Apple thing, fully assimilated, as if its past life had never existed.

Looking at Lala, it's likely true, as the NYT says, that Apple is "buying Lala's engineers, including its energetic co-founder Bill Nguyen, and their experience with cloud-based music services," as Apple did with iTunes so many years ago. But that's not all Apple was after, not if they paid $80 million (or whatever) to outbid at least two other competitors, as some reports say. It seems clear, looking at the history of Apple's iTunes acquisitions, Lala and its features are going to be integrated into iTunes in a very fundamental way.

After all, one of the central conceits of Lala—streaming your own music library anywhere—is something Apple's been looking at for a while, and it doesn't alter the fundamental iTunes model, the one that's so deeply tied to your own music collection. It just expands it. Lala, actually, was even in the midst of getting its streaming iPhone app approved.

And that's most likely what Lala is going to look like inside of the iTunes beast: You'll be able to stream your own library anywhere. The other half of Lala, the true streaming service, with its 10-cent songs, as a part of a new iTunes too, would radically alter the entire iTunes model by introducing one organized around streaming—while still preserving that core tenet of paying for and owning songs. The kind of value hierarchy that Apple is devoted to still works—songs you have more ownership of, that stay on your hard drive, cost more (like when DRM-free songs used to cost more) while ones that stay in the cloud are cheaper—even as it completely changes the way we'd buy music from iTunes, and if history's any guide, maybe digital music as a whole. (Oh, and iTunes' new web interface practically begs to be a streaming site.) It'd be a big step, even for a company that killed their most popular iPod, the mini, to introduce a brand new one, the nano.

True, we won't know precisely what Apple's going to do with LaLa until they do it. But we've got some rough ideas.

The UI's been redesigned with a new home page (up top), that's divided into three sections: The feed, which pulls in video and photo recommendations from your friends via Twitter and Facebook; Featured content, which is stuff Boxee highlights; and the queue, where you dump everything you want or plan to watch (for instance, you can add the video from any web page to your queue with a Boxee bookmarklet).

The other major UI change is the new global menu, which'll instantly drop you into any of Boxee's major sections, like movies, photos, TV or your favorites.

What looked impressive during the demo was how cleanly it aggregated both local and online sources of video content—that is, it collect and treats all video the same, whether it's from Netflix or on your hard drive. It's just all one big, searchable library. TV shows are organized more cleanly, too, by seasons and episodes.

Boxee's pushing its "apps" hard, and there's a few new ones, like the Suicide Girls one here—essentially, they're customized browsers that drop you into videos or pics or whatever. Clicker is probably the most interesting, in that it's a video show search engine of sorts, scouring the web for shows from multiple content sources, making it easy to drop into your Boxee queue.

On the technical side, Windows users will be a lot happier, since the backend has been rewritten to use DirectX instead of OpenGL, and it supports full graphics acceleration from Nvidia's Ion chips, meaning cheap PCs will be able to play 1080p video through Boxee. (Which makes us think even more strongly that the Boxee box is gonna be an Ion-based machine.

We'll see more of the Boxee box tonight, hopefully, and definitely more at CES next month, where it's gonna make its full debut. Which is where we'll hear more about Boxee's other "device partners," who'll be sticking Boxee on their own boxes in 2010. In other words, Boxee may very well be the next Netflix streaming app—embedded on anything that'll handle it, from TVs to Blu-ray players.

[Boxee]

Interestingly, the Times says that LaLa went to Apple to be acquired, and what Apple's after is LaLa's engineers, with their cloud service-y brains.

Apple's official response is that they "buy smaller technology companies all the time, and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans." Hmmm. [NYT]

Previously: NY Times reporter Brad Stone says that Apple has agreed to acquire the streaming music service LaLa as rumored, and the NYT is currently updating their story.

And she has good reason to be scared that an entire generation doesn't find a television to be an essential household item. People are flocking to the web to watch streaming shows, but the networks still aren't making any money off these views. Hulu, the largest streaming site, is getting over 40 million visitors a month who are viewing 5 billion minutes of shows and clips. And that number is only going up, while TV viewership is going down.

These content creators need to figure out a way to monetize this phenomenon, and fast. Because the genie is out of the bottle, and there's no putting him back in. [NY Times]

Here are a few reasons why you shouldn't spend $600 on this now. One, it's too early a technology to be sinking money into. Two, since it's early, the price will drop dramatically in the next year or two if you really want wireless HDMI. And three, we love wires, especially for situations like watching HD movies where you want to have as little interference to your picture as possible.

But if you really want it, here it is. [Best Buy via Dvice]

Hulu's corporate masters have reared their dragon heads from time to time in the past, like when it nuked Boxee and PS3 access, so you couldn't watch Hulu on your actual TV, and made it even harder to watch Hulu outside of the US.

Now, Hulu's blocking startup video discovery sites like Rippol, Yidio and Clicker from embedding its videos. Likely, again, because Hulu's content providers aren't too happy about somebody throwing all of that content into a single place that's not Hulu, even though theoretically, embedding is harmless—the video goods aren't being stolen, and Hulu still makes money off of the ads in the stream. I mean, we're talking about embedding here. This is about control.

And, given that Rupert Murdoch is publicly entertaining the idea of de-listing all of News Corp.'s content from Google (with Microsoft offering its own cash incentive to do so), a Hulu you have to pay for, or at least, is even more tightly controlled is more feasible than we'd like to think. (Hulu is a joint venture between Murdoch's News Corp. (which owns Fox), NBC Universal, and Disney (which owns ABC).

Ads, those I can deal with. Alec Baldwin's genius isn't free. Arbitrary restrictions that make it harder to watch what I want to—that, not so much. I'd rather watch nothing at all. I'm pretty lazy, after all. I can't even muster the energy to figure out when a TV show actually airs. (When does 30 Rock or Dexter run? I don't know.)

The way Hulu's going, it looks like I'm going to have a lot more time to play Modern Warfare 2. You know, TV dudes, the biggest entertainment event in history. The kind of thing that's pulling people away from their TVs, ripping their eyeballs away from the ads you sell to survive.

The sooner we quit Hulu, the less painful it'll be in the long run. [GigaOm]

Olive's music players are the kind of crazy high-end AV hardware that peasants like you and I shouldn't even be reading about, let alone contemplating. The 4 HD rips CDs to its huge 2TB hard drive, in addition to streaming from a PC, to be played through crazy high-end speakers. It's got a nice 4.3-inch touchscreen, and it's pretty nice-looking. So what's new? Well, the ports are all gold-plated, and the 4 HD adds a DAC the Opus N4 didn't have:

* Proprietary, high resolution DAC featuring Texas Instrument's 192khz/24-bit Burr-Brown PCM1792A.
* DAC may be used as an outboard DAC for any digital music source. With 24-bit/192kHz oversampling, noise and distortion are ultra low resulting in incredible purity in both high frequencies and low-level detail.

Basically it's a super simplified music player (just music, mind you, no other media) for incredibly rich old people for whom the CD is something they've just gotten comfortable with in the last six months or so. It's pretty, we'll give it that, but it seems like the kind of thing you'd see in SkyMall, not your buddy's entertainment center. It's available now for $2,000. [Olive]

In case you forgot, Sezmi plans to roll up live broadcast and cable TV along with web videos, on demand-movies and DVR functionality in a single, easy to navigate set-top box. Needless to say, this is a tall order, and most of us probably relegated Sezmi to the vaporware bin. However, trials of the product have begun in LA and a $25 million cash infusion from investors has given the project new life. In fact, it seems that Sezmi spent the last year working out deals with the likes of Sony Pictures, MGM Studios, Paramount Studios, Warner Brothers, Lion's Gate Entertainment and Universal Studios for on demand streaming, and ABC, CBS, CW, FOX, NBC, Turner, MTV Networks Discovery Channel, Telemundo and Univision for TV content.

Sezmi plans to offer a tiered pricing plan that starts with Sezmi Select, the entry tier, which will offer all local channels (in SD and HD) as well as access to on-demand content for $4.99 per month. Sezmi Supreme will include cable and local channels for $24.99 per month.

If you are interested in participating in the trial, you can apply for the LA pilot here. If you are lucky enough to get in, the equipment and the service will be free of charge for three months, after which you will be offered a discounted price on the DVR and tuners which normally runs $300. [Sezmi via Variety and Zats]

Boxee's post on the box has nothing in the way of details yet, so I'm just going to have to take a WILD guess at what this thing will look like: It'll be a box, with an Ion chipset, a medium-sized HDD, HDMI-out and a Boxee sticker and a $200 price tag. Why? Because nothing else would really make any sense.

We'll get to see the box—assuming it's not just this Boxee-compatible Myka number we saw a few days ago—come December 7th, when it gets the full unveiling treatment. Also interesting, though probably a little aspirational:

* make it easy for users to consume and find content – no matter what the source
* give content owners, aggregators, and developers the tools to create unique experiences with a variety of business models
* enable CE companies to enhance their Connected devices

This will be the first connected device running Boxee, but the idea is to provide consumers with a way to get Boxee in their living rooms, no matter whether it's on a Connected TV, game console, set-top box, BluRay player, computer, etc.

Multiple Boxee Boxes! Boxee Boxen! [Boxee]

Apparently, Myka goes beyond Hulu and Boxee allowing you to run other full PC applications like XBMC and "browse to any web site and play video content directly onto your TV." Thre is no mention of BitTorrent with this version, but given the fact it runs on Ubuntu Linux, it seems plausible. The base model ION is available now for $379 (Wireless-N and Blu-ray add ons bring it to $644) which only goes further in proving my point about these quasi-PC streaming set-top-boxes. Why would you spend $400 or more on what is essentially a Linux HTPC branded like a set-top-box, when you can buy full-fledged HTPCs for far less money?

Want Boxee and Hulu to play in high-def on your TV? Meet Myka ION

LINCOLN, Mass., Nov. 5, 2009 — Myka, makers of the magic box that downloads and streams high-definition videos onto your TV, is introducing the Myka ION — the first Web-to-TV product that can easily run Boxee, Hulu and other leading Internet video services.

Myka ION is powered by the Intel Atom Processor 330 and NVIDIA ION Graphics Processor, giving Myka ION fast media-player performance at a low cost.

Myka ION lets you browse to any Web site and play video content directly onto your TV — bypassing your PC entirely. No messing with conversion software, no tinkering with anything. Plug it in and it starts working right away.

"Technology has finally caught up with what consumers want out of Internet video services," said Myka President Dan Lovy. "They want to be freed from their computers and watch the growing variety of Web video content on their large-screen, high-definition living room TVs. And they want to do it without a lot of hassle and without video quality suffering.

"We've heard them loud and clear and we're proud to present the Myka ION, the first product to take advantage of the latest processor technology and finally give Web video consumers what they want."

The Intel and NVIDIA processors do all the heavy lifting, such as video encoding/decoding during playback, resulting in seamless, high-quality content beamed directly to your TV. The Myka ION is actually a mini-PC in itself.

With the Myka ION, you don't need to do any work to figure out how to get a downloaded video to actually play on your TV. With a wide range of file formats supported, you don't need to think about it at all. Just plug it in and enjoy.

[Myka]

But don't hold your breath on it happening yet: Peter Kafka has "yet to hear of a single programmer that has made a firm commitment." As he points out, while networks are constantly looking for new revenue, like those asshole aliens in Independence Day moving from world to world consuming every natural resource, they're nervous about the idea for a lot of reasons.

A lot of it has to do with the icky, sticky relationships between networks and cable operators, where everybody's worried about losing out as people start to watch more and more TV content online, not in their living room—where streaming video eats up bandwidth, and advertising revenues aren't nearly as rich (which is why Hulu wants to figure out new ways to get you to pay).

While these little complications might slow the process down, the exodus is inevitable. There's no stopping this. The internet is the new cable: Netflix, Hulu, BitTorrent. Apple might not get to launch it in a few months, but it will happen. Just give it time. The actually crazy part, if you ask me, is that the Apple TV might even live up to its name. [Hulu]

Before we get into the HD-XR, there's the other new model to introduce. The low-end Roku SD is pretty much a stripped-down version of the current Roku HD model, appropriately enough. It has Wi-Fi b/g and Ethernet, but only offers composite output—no HDMI, component, S-video or optical audio out, all of which the Roku HD has. The SD offers just standard-def streaming to go along with its standard-def output, and retails for $80 (the HD, in comparison, sells for $100). Both the SD and HD-XR are crammed into the same small, fanless case as the HD, so they're all the same size.

The HD-XR is Roku's new high-end model, selling for $130: In addition to everything the Roku HD has, the HD-XR is packing 802.11n Wi-Fi and, intriguingly, a USB port. But therein lies the problem with the HD-XR, and the reason we're bringing you a hands-on and not a review today: The USB port doesn't do anything. Yet.

Roku tells me that they've got some substantial additions coming to their service via automatic firmware upgrade in "the coming weeks." First is the Roku Channel Store, which "will offer a number of new content channels for the Roku player, many of which are free." This comes in addition to the currently offered Netflix (duh), Amazon and MLB. What could the new channels be? We'd say Hulu is a fair bet, given past rumors. Other dedicated streaming sites like ABC or MSNBC wouldn't be out of the question either, and since everybody's doing it, I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook and Twitter come to invade your tidy little Roku box.

Second is that currently-useless USB port—it may not do anything yet, but I assume it'll allow video playback from UMS devices like hard drives and flash drives when it's enabled through firmware. A helpful tip, Roku: Extensive codec support is mandatory, not optional, in a device that has as few features as this one. It only does a couple things, so it had better do them damn well. DivX, MKV, and H.264 would be a start.

So how does the HD-XR perform? Just about as well as I could hope. It's a bit slow to start streaming a video (two minutes at most, but that's a long time to stare at a progress bar on your TV), but once it started it never stutters, and video quality is nearly as good as when streaming on a computer. I do wish you could browse through Netflix's catalog, rather than only being able to stream what's in your Instant Watch queue, but it's super simple and works well. The remote is small but feels solid, and has few enough buttons that pretty much anyone can figure it out. Setup is easy and the antenna picks up my Wi-Fi signal just as well as my laptop. Overall I was really pleased with it, and so were my non-tech-savvy roommates—no mean feat, since they're not usually into all the nerd stuff that I deal with every day.

So what's new right now? Um, well, 802.11n. That's it. It's pretty disappointing to see new hardware released without the accompanying software that takes it to the next generation, especially given Netflix's invasion onto Blu-ray players (only $100!), HTPCs, PS3s and god knows what else. I'm not so sure the HD-XR is worth $130, given the growing ubiquity of Netflix streaming, so Roku had better bring it with this firmware upgrade—the days of a one trick pony in the living room are nearly up. [Roku]

Apparently, the free disc activates the Netflix mojo via BD-Live, in what must be the best use of BD-Live ever. At least until the next major system update, you'll have to load up the disc every time you want to use Netflix. But you'll be able to pick out movies or throw stuff into your queue using an onscreen interface, so there's no going back to the old-school days where you had to add stuff to your queue on your computer before strolling over to your Xbox and TV.

Pop on over to Netflix to reserve the disc now—I have a feeling there's gonna be a huge demand crush for them. [Netflix, Sony, Thanks Kyle B!]