Well, I hear ya. Believe me, I despise my cable company for the same reasons... the prices have gotten out of hand.
If you're going to be displaying your stuff on the computer, you don't need an AppleTV for that... You can share you iTunes library among your home computers now. We do this in my house, as my husband and I share a library, but my daughter has her own... but we can still enjoy listening to each other's music, video and TV selections. I can sit in my bedroom on my MacBook and watch an episode of Jericho which is stored in my main library across the house on the G5.
As for connecting to TV, you CAN already do that with an iPod and I believe on any Mac as long as you have the right cable. I've only done it with the iPod so I'm not sure on the specifics.
What the AppleTV does is stream FROM your music library, store on a computer somewhere in your house, to the television it connects to. It can store some of you programs on the box itself, and it offers you the ability to schedule transferring them as well -- so you can say "store the latest three episodes of program X".
The biggest thing though is that you have to buy the content from iTunes, or get 3rd party software to rip your DVDs into iTunes. AppleTV all works off the iTunes libraries in the house, stored on computers. It isn't a DVR.
We had considered getting rid of all our movie channels and just using the AppleTV as a sort of "on demand" service... but like I said, the HD content just isn't there yet. I can watch Jericho recorded on my TiVo-like DVR in HD and watch it in full widescreen high res HD... if I bought it from iTunes, as an example, it would not be in HD.
And I hear you on DVDs... We have over 800 in our library, and I even have it catalogued on one of my laptops.... LOL... I think we need a 12-step group
