Mike Torres talks some smack:
I won’t buy or recommend an Apple TV to anyone. If you want to know what the picture quality is like, do a couple Tequila shots, spin around a few times, bang your head against the floor, and then watch broadcast TV on an old 19″ JVC. Don’t skip a step.
I’m sure the man in the turtleneck has a brilliant master plan, but I’m not ready to sign up either. Can’t someone figure out a way to deliver HDTV to my big screen set over my high-speed connection?
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
Sure. Get a tricked-out $3000 Windows Media PC with HD output. Put it on your LAN with gigabit ethernet. Make sure the other machines in your home are also on GigE and have really, really fast multi-terabyte disk arrays, which you’ll need for all that HD content anyway. Go to town.
For people who don’t want to spend several grand on equipment but do want to watch downloaded movies and TV shows in their living room, there are things like Apple TV. That’s the compromise. It’s probably just as well since the 12 people with FIOS internet are the only ones currently able to download an HD movie over the Interwebs in less than a week.
Sort of like how your fellow alpha geeks are always complaining about how lame the graphics are on a $300 game console vs. a $4000 PC with a $1500 liquid-cooled video card. Well, duh.
Uh, s.m? I have a $400 Dell dual-core PC with a $50 high-def TV card and Windows Media Center. I can stream HD content to my Xbox 360 over a regular Fast Ethernet connection. It looks fabulous.
If you want to think that it requires thousands of dollars of equipment to do this stuff, go right ahead. Those of us who are actually doing it will be happy to let you stick with your fantasies and your crappy SD content.
PS: An HD movie is about 5GB. On my $39 a month DSL connection it takes about three hours to download that.