With the announcement of Google TV, we have yet another box to connect in the living room though it seems a bit half baked at the moment.  Many have tried their hand at convergence of TV and Internet such as Microsoft with their media center PC or other various Linux based devices such as Boxee or Roku.  Even the mighty Apple has had a difficult time carving out anything more than a niche in the TV market.

Blu-ray players and game consoles have a good share of the market but they have more limited functionality.  Full fledged Linux or Windows based media PCs have a lot of functionality but their complexity and cost are a real turn off for the mass market which scoffs at anything above $100.  It’s also clear that we are still in the wild wild west of converging the Internet and Television with lots of companies jockeying to dominate the market or at least carve out a niche.  Meanwhile we have content providers like Hulu cutting off Boxee or Google cutting off Syabas from YouTube.

It’s a cut throat competitive market that is at a crucial stage in infancy and consumers are torn trying to figure out which device gets their money and their dwindling HDMI connectors in the back of their HDTV.  Who’s going to win?  I don’t know, and I’d be retiring to Hawaii in two years if I knew.  I honestly can’t figure out what to buy though I’m leaning towards a full fledged media center computer that does everything and won’t get locked out of certain websites.