Top consumer electronics manufacturers are preparing to unveil several new lines of 3D-enabled television sets and Blu-Ray players, but their laptops will represent the tipping point for in-home 3D.

Reasonably-priced, Blu-Ray ready and capable of delivering Internet-based entertainment content straight to their screens, 3D-enabled laptops are a triple threat.  As a critical mass of these familiar devices hits the market, consumers will be only too happy to open their doors and let them in.

Hard-core gamers, the earliest of the early adopters, already are getting hooked on the immersive at-home experience that 3D delivers.  They won’t be going back.  And neither will sports fans and other consumers, who are growing increasingly accustomed to downloading their entertainment content and watching it on their computer monitors.

There’s no question the forthcoming 3D-enabled big screens will have enormous appeal and grow the in-home 3D market.  But in the short term, consumer electronics companies can get laptops into stores (and in turn, into homes) quickly and inexpensively.  Seeding demand for ever-more 3D content with laptops will only help the sales of televisions down the road.

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The future of satellite television with a different kind of internet tv we knew it would happen but did not know when, it’s the coolest thing ever and you must see how easy it is to now have your computer or laptop provide you HD tv with all channels and its direct HD with No hardware to install, NO bandwidth limits, No subscription, No monthly fee, you already have what you need if you have a computer and you can now take HD online tv with you anywhere anytime 24/7. It’s only been available for about four months and wow was I amazed it is the coolest thing ever why would anyone want to pay for tv cable or satellite when all the same stuff is on your computer how cool is this, you can connect your computer to your tv with NO monthly charge, even MAC users can have tv online. This is why we love the evolution of technology.

When Roku introduced its Internet TV box in 2008, it offered a grand total of one content source–Netflix–and was in fact sometimes called the Netflix Player. Then it began adding options: Amazon Video on Demand and Major League Baseball. Tonight, it’s announcing that it plans to add a bevy of stuff via its new Channel Store, which will allow an array of providers to bring their content to Roku’s box, and therefore to your TV.

The Channel Store in its debut form–which will roll out to existing boxes over the next couple of weeks–is both promising and pretty modest. There are ten new channels, including some well-known ones (Blip.TV, Facebook Photos, Flickr, Pandora, Revision3’s TV shows, and Twit.TV) and some lesser-known options (FrameChannel, Mediafly, MobileTribe, and Motionbox). They’re all free, and you choose to add any or all of them to your box through a process that involves activating them in a computer’s Web browser (and which occasionally gets a little cumbersome–MobileTribe, a social-network aggregator, makes you paintstakingly enter social-network login info on your TV using the Roku’s remote).

Like Roku’s existing channels, some of these new ones offer video pure and simple, including Twit.TV and Revision3. But Pandora brings music to Roku for the first time. And other channels, including Facebook Photos, Flickr, and MobileTribe, feel like rudimentary applets, since they bring parts of services you use on other devices to Roku. Motionbox even lets you upload videos that can be viewed by anyone who owns a Roku box.

They’re really rudimentary in some instances–as far as I can figure out, the only way to advance to the Facebook photos of a friend whose name begins with “Z” is to skip past every other friend, one friend at a time–but the move beyond video puts the Roku box into at least vague, indirect competition with TV widget platforms such as Yahoo’s Connected TV.

Roku executives told me that they expect a lot more channels to come online quickly, although for now it’s not going to be a free for all: they’ll all be approved by Roku, and there’s stuff the company won’t approve on grounds of taste. The initial lineup of channels is certainly enough to whet my appetite for what’s to come, and the addition of Pandora instantly broadens the Roku box’s appeal. The Channel Store will be available on all three Roku variants: the $129.99 Roku HD-XR (with Wireless-N connectivity), the $99,99 Roku HD, and the $79.99 Roku SD.

Even though adding each channel involves some work, the Roku box still rates high for ease-of-use overall, and even the top-of-the-line HD-XR is aggressively priced. With Apple TV largely stuck in limbo and Vudu seemingly focusing on getting its cool service built into TVs and other devices, Roku is the Internet TV box whose capabilities and content mix are evolving the most rapidly–and if the Channel Store catches on, that evolution could go into fast-forward mode in the months to come.

Bit of a shameless plug for us here.  We have recently started compiling some of our Music Programming on You Tube.

Army of Id are the Production Company responsible for everything on the Channel, and it features some great Original Music Programming,  and has been a Labour of Love, with work spanning 2 years, in the making.

So, get on over to see music from Breakestra (featured below), Roni Size, Sweet Charles, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Scratch Perverts, Cortisol/Retinol, Yurodny/Myriada and many more!  Its all good.

I’ve written periodically of my flirtation with dumping cable for an Internet-only approach to my TV watching. I haven’t, however, pulled the trigger–mostly because cable still has a lot of live programming, such as news and sports, that I can’t replicate over the Net alone.

That’s why I’m intrigued by Sezmi, a TV service that’s announcing that it’s rolling out to its first real customers (in Los Angeles). The service aims to provide a more personalized, Net-savvy, inexpensive alternative to cable and satellite–complete with the real broadcast and cable channels you can’t get from Apple TV, Roku, or Vudu. It does so via a 1TB DVR/set-top box that provides access to three types of TV sources: broadcast stations, cable channels, and Internet content. (It snags the first two kinds over the air, via a powerful antenna in a box that looks like a loudspeaker: Sezmi simply grabs local broadcast channels as is, and the company is leasing spectrum from local broadcasters to transmit cable channels–including both standard-def and HD.)

Sezmi’s lineup of cable channels isn’t as expansive as a higher-tier package on cable or satellite, but it’s got Animal Planet, Bravo, Cartoon Network,  CNN, Comedy Central, Discovery, MSNBC, MTV, Nickelodeon, Oxygen, SyFy, TBS, TCM, TLC, TNT, VH1, and more. The most notable omissions are sports channels–I don’t see ESPN or others in the lineup–and premium movie channels such as HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax. But Sezmi does offer a store that sells and rents movies and TV shows from a library of thousands of titles (powered in part by Roxio’s Cinemanow). You also get access to Internet video such as YouTube and podcasts.

The service is touting itself as

Sezmi uses its roomy 1TB hard disk to give each member of the family his or her own personalized on-demand TV experience: Grownups and kids both get program guides tailored to their watching habits that weave together broadcast, cable, and Internet shows, including ones on the DVR and ones showing at scheduled times.

The company gave me a sneak peek that included a demo of its interface: It’s impossible to come to definitive conclusions without hands-on time, and I’m particularly curious about how seamlessly it knits together its disparate sources of content. But from what I saw, it looks reasonably promising.

How much will you pay for Sezmi, and where will you get it? Its goal is to undercut the cost of cable: Basic service that only includes broadcast stations will go for $4.99 a month, and a broadcast/cable package will cost $24.99 a month. A la carte movies and TV episodes are extra. You’ll either buy the box and antenna (for $299, $50 more than TiVo charges for a DVR with one-sixth the capacity) or rent it. Once the service rolls out to more regions–which the company says will happen soon–it’ll be available both at retail stores and through service providers such as medium-sized phone companies and DSL ISPs.

I generally feel like I’m watching maybe five percent of the channels my Comcast cable service gives me–and among the very few that I’m not willing to give up are CNN, MSNBC, and TCM. So Sezmi, which has all those stations, sounds like a plausible alternative–and even if I had to plunk down $299 for the box, I’d make it up pretty quickly in the money I’d save over cable.

Cable and satellite TV subscribers: Are you basically happy, or does Sezmi sound alluring?