Life was so simple when my cathode ray tube television set pulled broadcast images out of thin air to display on its big curved screen. Now, to the chagrin of both my wife and mother-in-law, our living-room Pioneer high definition flat screen television is surrounded by “set-top” boxes nowhere nearly small enough to fit on top of it.

Aside from the home-theatre audio visual system and cable/satellite boxes, such boxes typically fall into one of these categories: