Yes, but Cable is going the way of Dish/Direct TV, and FIOS TV in making it impossible to use your own DVR (or MythTV, Media Center, EyeTV, etc) to record anything but the basic network channels (they'll take that away if they can too) and requiring you to RENT their DVR for a fee (Communistcast gets $10/month for a NON-HD DVR, $20 for an HD one). AFAIK, these don't provide a skip button, only an old-school VCR-style FF button, which is way more annoying to use. They can also program them to disable FF over commercials at all.

The 85W figure you are posting is very false. You probably saw the max power rating of the AC adapter supplied with the earlier G4 (PowerPC) Mac Mini. The Intel models have a 110W power adapter, but that isn't what they draw most of the time. I have a couple of early 2009 Mac Mini's, and also have a Kill-a-watt watt meter. At idle (which a server is going to be run at 90-99% of the time) the 2009 Mini draws only 12W, and that is with a 500GB (laptop-type 2.5") hard drive, and 4GB (2x2gb) of DDR3 RAM. The earlier Intel-based models (2006-2008) had an idle power consumption of about 22W. Even encoding video with handbrake at 100% CPU load, the highest I could get the 2009 Mini to draw was 32W. These figures are for Mac OS X 10.5.x (Leopard). I don't know what the figures would be for Linux, but probably similar. All that said, if you want low power consumption in a mainstream (X86 based PC, not specialty ARM or MIPS based NAS hardware), then stick to mobile components. Look for a motherboard that supports Mobile Core2 Duo, or even older Pentium M mothhboards (cheaper$). Use mobile hard drives (idle power of 2-3W vs. 9-13W for a desktop drive), and the minimum number of RAM DIMMs (eg, use a single 2GB instead of 2 1GB modules). I have a file-backup server running an Aopen mobile-core2 duo motherboard with a 2GHz T7200 Core2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a 3ware 9500S hardware RAID controller, and four 1TB hitachi desktar harddrives. This server consumes 56W at idle. Not bad, considering the four hard drives. It only consumes about 8W more than the Buffalo (Linkstation?) ARM-based RAID NAS that I had with the same hard drives. Unlike the Buffalo, this wasis "normal" PC hardware that is easy to put any modern Linux distro on, and it has a "real" hardware RAID card. Also, the performance is MUCH better than any ARM-based dedicated NAS system that I've tried. And, as hardware impoves, I can upgrade any part of this system easily. Total build price was about $200 plus drives (less than the dedicated RAID NAS systems).