If you were to poll the average person and ask them what their home media center currently is, chances are they will tell you they have: a TV, a VCR, a DVD player and in many cases a cable box. However, I think this will change significantly in the near future because a computer-centric system would prove to be a better replacement.

First of all, video tapes are completly obsolete and even with DVDs, I find myself now prefering to buy movies online and save the space of more disks. My thought is that this new media center could be a computer like the Mac Mini that is very power efficent but also does not take up too much space, this system will still have an optical media drive to accomodate any CDs or DVDs that you already have, but more importantly, it has a large hard drive to store all the media you want on it and also have the option to transfer the media over your home network to computers and other media centers in the house. It will run a normal computer operating system in addition to media center software so it can also be a computer in addition to a media center. It will be connected to a big screen TV so you can get a full image and a high quality image. The media center will play media off the device itself, other computers on the network as well as stream media from the Internet off sites like Hulu. This can already be accomplished by using media center software like Boxee, although they no longer offer access to Hulu but, that is one of the reasons I reccommend using a normal operating system instead of a specialized operating system like MythTV but, I think in the future there will be Media Center software that does integrate Hulu and other television streaming sites. This system would save a lot of space because you only need one small box to power your entire home media center and you can save space form having many players. This is what I plan to do when I get my own place and I do not plan on getting a cable subscription because it is no longer nessesary!