The problem with that big box with the silver screen in the living room is it doesn’t have a keyboard. It’s dumb. It can’t tell you the weather. It has no idea that there’s a far more useful box upstairs called, the computer. Seldom the domain of the female of the species, the computer connects to something called the internet and can access a plethora of movies, videos and christ knows what else! So if one fines what’s on the dumb silver screen uninteresting, chances are, they’re upstairs on the computer trying to find something interesting. And so the female of the species complains. Bugger. If only there were a way to combine the two . . .

Well bugger me dead, there is! It’s called a Phillips Streamium SLM5500. It provides a wifi link between your computer and your TV. So now anything on your PC can be watched the way it was intended. Rather than all cramped up on your desk in the study. And let me tell you, it’s bloody brilliant. It’s a box no bigger than a lunchbox with an aerial out the back. But the best thing is that the box blends in perfectly with the stupid silver screen. It doesn’t look like a computer at all! Nor does it make a stupid whirring noise.

To set it up, you plug it in, and after about 40 mins of setup (it’s fiddly, but it’s not that difficult. Not nerd difficult, but not iPod easy). There’s also some software you have to setup on your PC. It tells the streamer what directories you want to share out. From here on in, it’s driven by a very simple, quality remote control. All the menus on your TV screen are simple, clear and easily usable. No complex navigation.

At this point your probably asking, ‘does it have a hard drive?’. The simple answer is I don’t know! Does it run an operating system? Dunno. Frankly, it works and I don’t care. There are more complicated media gates out there. But I dare say there not as living room, or female friendly as this one. And besides, you don’t necessarily want to save everything to your media gate. I don’t. I’m quite happy to stream them. It’s a living room, not a laboratory.

Load time for movies is OK. It takes about 3 seconds to buffer the file you want to watch. And get this, I accidentally left it on for about 12 hours. I came home from work and it hadn’t stopped. It paused for about 20 seconds AFTER 12 HOURS OF CONTINUOUS PLAYBACK, and then just kept truckin’. No dramas at all. So far it hasn’t overheated, reset or shat itself in anyway. One thing is though, when you turn it on, it does take almost a minute to load and get on the network. But who cares, it looks good!

So there you have it, If you can find one they’re cheap, relatively simple and they make your TV useful again. My suggestion is bloody well buy one now. It easily plays files of your PC, there’s no FTP, no Linux, no shared drives and very little stuffing around. What more do you want?