One solution: http://www.apple.com/appletv/

I'm assuming this was in reply to me.

It's a nice idea, but I don't see that buying a new TV (to get the HDMI port), a PC-to-TV transfer device (such as AppleTV), AND various shows on iTunes just to avoid cable makes much sense, at least for me.

I'm pretty much Apple's target audience with the AppleTV -- I'm a Mac fanboy, I don't watch regular television, and I have a huge library of digital media — yet I haven't purchased the product, and I probably won't.

Why not?

1. It's limiting. Currently, Kris and I are able to watch our iTMS TV shows on this laptop wherever and whenever we feel like it. We're not changed to the television.
2. It's expensive.
3. There's not enough storage. If I remember right, the AppleTV currently comes with 40gb of storage (though there's strong speculation that other, higher-capacity models are in the offing). This is DUMB. Will that even hold a single season of Battlestar Galactica? If I buy an AppleTV, I want it to hold a lot of content. I don't want to have to be constantly swapping stuff off to a media server. Despite Apple's hype &mash and remember I'm an Apple fanboy — their wireless transfer rates are abysmal. I'm not thrilled by the prospect of moving stuff back-and-forth tot he AppleTV, and want to keep that to a minimum.

The AppleTV doesn't really offer me anything that my laptop doesn't already do. (In fact, because it's chained to the television, it's more limiting.) Until this changes, I'm not likely to buy one. Give me a huge hard drive or DVR capabilities and I'll consider it...

Just because you download a TV show, doesn't mean you have to watch it on your computer. A DVD burner combined with a DVD player that plays DivX/Xvid files is all you need to put the video on your TV set.

Yes, but again, paying at least $50 for a DivX-capable DVD player, upgrading my computer's RAM so that I could actually handle doing other things besides burning DivX discs, and continuing to spend time and money on downloading shows, just to avoid paying $15 a month for cable, adds up to a process that is not worth it to me.

We tried NetFlix for a while, but eventually ran out of titles that we really wanted to watch, so we canceled.

As far as TV goes, we just have good old rabbit ears, so we mainly just watch PBS -- except during football season, of course. But if the sun is shining, the TV is off and we are outside with the kids and the dogs.