A few weeks ago I wrote about the short fat pipe I now have in my living room.  It’s great: while internet television solutions all continue to suffer from a lack of premium content, much of that programming is currently freely available via any web browser – and my little $99 device does a decent job of getting it all from my PC over to my TV – wirelessly.

Granted, this short fat pipe solution of mine is nothing more than an interim measure.  The technology needed to make  internet video directly accessible from the television is here, but its going to be a while before the business-side folks reach consensus on how to best navigate The End Of  Television As We Know It.  Meanwhile, products are being released in fits and starts: just recently, poor reviews of Google TV (mostly centered around this very same content issue) have forced Google to ask their hardware partners to delay the launch of any devices while they regroup.

Filling the void are the various PC-to-TV ‘short fat pipe’ solutions covered in my previous post, along with more recent arrivals such as the very clever SnapStick.  Although not for sale yet, this device shows promise.  Rather than have to push bandwidth-heavy HDMI from the computer to the television, the SnapStick device will sit next to the television and connect via HDMI over a cable or be embedded within your next TV or Blu-ray player.   Merely another set-top box, you say?  Not really – rather than building an yet another dedicated internet video platform from the ground up only to have it rejected by the still gun-shy content owners (i.e. Google, Apple, and Boxee), SnapStick had the insight to realize that the web browser model is the only game in town for the time being.  The other cool thing about Snapstick is that rather than have a complicated ‘computeresque’ remote (like the Sony and Logitech Google TV products), you install an app on your smart phone and use the phone’s native web browser to navigate to content: once you find a video you’d like to watch, just flick your phone at the SnapStick device, and Snapstick will stream the content and repackage it for your television.  Take that, Flash-unfriendly Apple…

Too good to be true?  Maybe – if the hulus of the world can sniff Boxee HTTP requests and deny them access despite Boxee’s best repeated attempts to ‘sneak in’ by appearing to the outside world like any other Mozilla browser, I’m not sure why the same fate doesn’t await SnapStick.