iPod reminds me of Singapore - looks great and certainly works well, but it relies on someone with a really nasty-looking whip telling you what you can and can't do, with emphasis on the "can't".

On topic, I'm not sure how it works with DirecTV, but usually these types of boxes have a way of connecting to the company providing them. Older hardware would have a telephone connection to dial a certain number and transmit billing information if you wanted to watch pay-per-view, for instance. I'd imagine that DirecTV would work the same sort of way, but it would use an internet connection either through a phone connection or some kind of LAN connection which has internet access.

The system probably doesn't have a way of connecting to the internet for viewing websites (although I don't mind being proved wrong there), but you can certainly do the same sort of thing using a laptop with the right video connections or the new generation of video game consoles since I'm pretty sure they all have in-built browsers of various kinds.

I am not sure but I think there is no device/application yet that allows you to connect to the internet through the tv. But I have read an article online that says in two years, 90 percent of all Sony products will connect to the Internet. It came from Howard Stringer, the chief executive of Sony products.

Another part of an article:

"Think of Internet on the TV like the Web browser. One view is that the Web, a browser like Firefox, Chrome or I.E., will be right on the television in the next couple years. Another view is, no, a PC-based Web is just too complex. The second one is the phase that we're in now."

-Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix

You don't need a device or smth like that to connect internet through TV, you need a soft for that and you'll have a tv on internet, have a look here http://www.onlinetvx.com/

I think now there are many TVs that has Internet options via WiFi. So if you have a broadband router you can forward some internet to the TV which has an WiFi option.