Here Come the New Internet-TV Boxes

For years, I've fantasized about a phone call I want to make. It's the one in which I dial my cable company and gently break the news that I'm canceling its TV service. With all the shows and movies I care to consume available over the Internet, I'll ask rhetorically, why should I cough up so much cash each month for several hundred channels of stuff I have no intention of watching?

I'm not quite ready to place that call. But I don't think the day is too far off — and I have my eye on a bunch of new Internet-TV boxes that are arriving for the holiday season. All of them let you stream high-definition, on-demand video right off the Net, over your wireless (or wired) home network and on to your HDTV. And though they're not the first gadgets to do the job, a happy confluence of better hardware, lower price tags and broader content offerings makes the idea more appealing than ever.