Home Media Devices

Streamium wireless home entertainment – PC link your home entertainment system.
Philips and several other companies have taken the idea of streaming radio tuners one step further and created devices that allow you to view media content from your PC and the internet (photos, music, videos) on your TV.
The interesting thing is that these devices seem to be conforming to a standard called UPNP which I believe has to do with Zeroconf/Rendezvous.
It also looks like TiVo is going in this direction as well with their Home Media Option.

cat to the network

The GNU Netcat — Official homepage
From the site:
Netcat is a featured networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using the TCP/IP protocol.
It is designed to be a reliable “back-end” tool that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and exploration tool, since it can create almost any kind of connection you would need and has several interesting built-in capabilities.