Acer has taken the convergence road with a 37in HD-ready LCD TV packing a media gateway that can access video, still images and audio over a home network.
The 2299-euro AT305W can also access internet radio if the network has a web link. It runs Linux and uses Acer's own interface and rendering software. Lutz Schoppe, consumer-electronics product business director, said Microsoft software and Intel hardware would have added around $400 to the system cost compared with around $70 for the Linux platform.
These prices are intriquing because it should be possible to use the same platform to convert the TV into a something like a smart display - that is, one that acts as a front end for  a linked PC running Windows XP Professional, in effect turning the Linux-TV into a fully-fledged PC.
The original idea of a smart display was to have a flat panel that you could use as a standard monitor, but also pick up and use rather like a Tablet PC within Wifi range of the host PC. Microsoft quietly dropped the idea after heavily promoting it a couple of years back.
The official reason was that manufacturers could not make them cheap enough to sell but there were suspicions (at least, at PCW) that Microsoft got cold feet about the project because it gave non-Microsoft products an entrée into Windows systems.  The display, effectively a thin client, was simply transmitting user commands and displaying the PC's responses - tasks that do not require a high-powered Windows system.
Acer's machine does not do this - but it does show that the TV could take up where the smart display left off. Media streaming, oddly enough, was the one task a smart display could not do, and Acer's networked TV is interesting enough even as it stands; sooner or later, it will surely be copied by other manufacturers. One of the great convergence debates has been whether the hub of the digital home will be in a PC, the step-top box, or the TV set. In practice the distinctions are becoming blurred.
Another major debate has been whether the IT industry or  consumer-electronics companies will dominate the digital home. Acer president Gianfranco Lanci told a world press briefing in Athens that the IT industry would change consumer electronics because it knew how to get devices talking.
He said: 'People in PCs, without standards… they go crazy. The CE industry goes crazy with them.'
Schoppe showed the networked Acer TV screen an HD video over an 11g Wifi but he said the machine's wired ethernet port would have to be used for a twin HD stream. 'If you want two TV streams over wireless you will have to go to SD (standard definition),' he said.
Acer is also selling the media gateway as a 249-euro standalone product, styled like a hifi device. And it is selling a similarly-styled Microsoft Media Center PC called the Aspire L.