I got a similar type of media player few years back now (
http://www.xtreamer.net/ mk1 ) and its still used in the living room today. I would expect technology to be much better with boxes from Boxee and Roku. Note though even with better wireless these days it's better to connect these boxes with wired cable to stream media - wireless just doesn't work with hi-def streams. Boxee used to be software that was spun off from XBMC (
http://xbmc.org/) not sure how well its progressed into their hardware player. If you are up for a little bit of tinkering they are micro computers aimed at education that are powerful enough to run XBMC like the Raspberry Pi (
http://www.raspberrypi.org/ http://www.raspbmc.com/ ) that cost about £30.
Ali