I was wrong!
I’ve streamed a few things to our old plasma using the AppleTV and the iPad which was fine, but our new Panasonic plasma with Viera Connect (internet services including You Tube) and a wired network connection has taken it to a new level.

Obviously the quality of the original video is the defining factor but I watched a load of stuff last night from the VolvoOceanRace and it was really good. Picture was clear with no buffering – and we have a comparatively slow broadband connection.

I dont know how much of the improvement is down to advances in TVs but I can see how important You Tube will be in the future. In fact with the TVs built in HD Freeview and HD Freesat tuners, iPlayer, etc plus the ability to pause live TV and record directly from the TV onto a USB disk, it’s not far off making our Sky box redundant!

record directly from the TV onto a USB disk

Have you got this to work? Disks I tried all came up incompatible, so I gave up. Like streaming vids from the PC, nearly everything is incompatible. Apart from that its a great telly!

I’ve not tried yet but apparantly you need a specific Buffalo drive – although it seems according to this a number of drives work.
It’s a shame you can’t play MPEG4 vids from the network/usb drive but I may try converting something to DIVX and see how it goes.
Very impressed with the TV even though it’s not the ‘latest’ model – still got another 88 days to evaluate it and take it back to Costco if I want 🙂

record directly from the TV onto a USB disk

I’ve a cheap TV that does this, the drive needs to be formatted to FAT32 but once I’d sorted that side it it was fine. Not sure about your more expensive tellies.