I should also mention that I picked up one of the LG "Smart" TVs. It connects to my PC via the WiFi network, and plays any videos I have using Plex Media Server. It's a convenient system.

-MoG

I was in your exact position (minus the kids) in January, and I settled on a bit of a hybrid system. I have a Blu-Ray player to play my existing (past) movie collection. For Netflix and some Hulu Plus streaming I have a Roku HD; it also supports Amazon Prime and a plethora of other channels that I haven't dug into much. For everything else I have a spare 35' HDMI cable (www.monoprice.com) that I connect to my laptop, add 2.4ghz mouse and keyboard and it's a very robust solution.

The additional thing to note is that all of this is supported by a Comcast internet-only plan. If you take the raw coaxial cable coming into the house before your modem and split it to be sent to your TV, you will get all of the major networks in HD and a lot of other content as well. This fulfills any "live TV" watching we want to do, such as sports or reality-tv.

The conversion to this solution cost me about $200 in cables, the Roku, etc., but my monthly fees for internet and entertainment media have dropped from $130 to $58. So it has already payed for itself.

-MoG

I wonder if this has come out of Intel's acquision of Cognovision, and I hope it's better than what they gave developers in 2011. I worked with this product for about a year, attempting to integrate it into our digital signage systems. Not only did it take a dedicated i5 with 2gb of RAM to safely run in the background, it often (as much as 40% of the time) produced the wrong information about a person. Gender was correct about 80% of the time, age was correct in only about 30% of samples, and race was almost never correct (except for very dark skinned folks were alwas called determined to be of African origin).

The result was that we had to write an algorythm to essentially average out samples over a given duration. When we took 500 samples over 5 seconds, dropped the extremes, and averaged the rest we improved the accuracy to nearly 85%, but that is still pretty bad when you consider that automated actions will be taken based on those results (i.e. to play content for YOUR demographic).

I don't really want my TV watching me.

-MoG