Sign up via your PC and the Rovi-powered app will deliver movie trailers, music videos, educational stuff, and (via Wealth TV) full-length shows—all of it free—to any 2010-11 Samsung LED-LCD smart TV or plasma smart TV. Paid content will become available later this year.

The Best Buy Music Cloud uses a PC or Mac application which scans your iTunes library (though this is not specifically an Apple-related service). Then it accepts music uploads and streams them to computers or mobile devices, the latter including iOS, Android, or BlackBerry. You can upload playlists as well as music files.

Rumor has it that Facebook users will soon have access to a Music Dashboard page. In addition to telling you what your friends are listening to, it may also allow streaming.

From whom you'd be streaming was still up for grabs at presstime. Some observers said Netflix would be the obvious choice. But Hulu or some other streaming service could turn out to be the lucky winner.

The number of adults who intend to buy one or more audio components has risen to 39 percent, versus 35 percent a year back.

The convergence train has long since left the station and one of the results is that TVs are adopting more and more computerized functions. And we all want our computers to run fast, so it's good news that Panasonic has adopted a faster UniPhier processor for its Viera TVs and Blu-ray players.

The Cortex-A9 is a 1.4GHz dual-core chip. Panasonic says it can muster "two TV broadcasting channels [we're guessing that means streams], as well as Internet-based content and applications in high-resolution at the same time. In addition, the new chip is able to reduce power consumption of and the number of components used in smart TVs, which will help drive smart TVs to spread in the global market."