Packetnews is your shopping list,
IRC is your checkout counter
I was thinking about buying something similar but instead I just used an old computer and made a cheap HT-PC. I just run svideo out from my video card to my TV and wham, I have a all-in-one media center. I'm going to upgrade my sound card and maybe, later on, use a old server rack to store all my music and movies but really it saved me a little bit.