It has been a good week for old chestnuts, with a product concept that has been rolled out many times before revived in London, and another one being trumpeted - again - at the Comdex exhibition in Las Vegas.
Do you (still) fancy the internet on your TV? This time it comes from French company Netgem, whose i-Player teams up a web browser and 56k modem with a decoder for the recently launched digital terrestrial TV service Freeview.
On the surface the deal looks a good one. "Viewers willing to pay the £99 one-off cost to access Freeview, will be offered a device that gives them all 30 channels plus Internet access for £149.99," runs the blurb.
And, given its budget price, the box punters get is impressive. Usefully, alongside the Scart lead for hooking up to the TV, there is also a USB socket for connecting a printer.
Flash memory means users can grab images from a digital camera, which can then be sent as e-mail attachments. There's even a tiny portable 20Gb hard disk as an optional extra that allows user to record TV programmes.
The i-Player is accompanied by a specially adapted remote control for basic surfing/e-mailing. However, to send any kind of meaningful e-mail, the consumer has to add a further £29.99 for wireless keyboard.
The biggest obstacle facing Netgem is consumers' reluctance to surf the internet from their sofa on a screen several feet away.
But there are other drawbacks too. While there is a "walled garden" of easy to access general information websites (weather, shopping, entertainment and so on), other internet pages have to be re-purposed for the TV. Inevitably they lack the clarity of those displayed on a PC screen.
Netgem's other major problem will be the price of surfing. Surfers who use their box pay standard phone rates. But these days very few people have metered internet access. Those without broadband often take advantage of attractive deals that offer the internet anytime for as little as £10 a month.
Sending a 500k JPEG photograph on the Netgem box, or accessing a host of graphics-heavy, sites could work be time-consuming and, so, pricey.
Perhaps I am being a little too negative. After all an extra £50 over the price of a standard Freeview decoder gives internet newbies the chance to send e-mail and sample the web - not bad for the price.
Yet at the height of the internet boom, neither of the great UK budget consumer electronics champions - Sky (with its Open Internet system) or Bush (with its Internet TV) - could realise the potential analysts had predicted for the web on a TV. I can't imagine how several years down the line Netgem will be able to pull it off.
Meanwhile, over in Las Vegas, the PC industry has also revisited an old favourite. At a panel discussion at the Comdex exhibition speakers from both Microsoft and Apple outlined how the computer is set to take centre stage from television.
Both Microsoft and Apple were touting the software too. The former's Windows Media Centre edition, a "fun" version of the operating system, offers the user the opportunity to control entertainment features by using a TV style remote control.
Apple has technology called Rendezvous, which is integrated into the 10.2 version of Mac OS X. Next year it will allow Mac owners to stream music stored on one Mac to other Macs on the same domestic network.
While there is no doubting that both Media Center and Rendezvous are innovative technologies, history shows that when they attempt to muscle in on consumer electronics territory PC software manufacturers don't always get it right.
Media Center is in fact the latest in a long line of Microsoft technologies that have targeted the living room including WebTV - an internet on your set system that was moderately successful in the USA, but not popular enough to make the trip across the Atlantic.
Ultimately the future of consumer electronics is likely to be shaped by companies like Sony and Philips, who are all too painfully aware that within a decade the piles of electronic boxes in a home will be replaced by a server, a mini network, flat screens and user interfaces. And that developing entertainment software systems is central to their business.
Perhaps in the future both Microsoft and Apple will seek alliances with consumer electronics companies. Maybe then we will see realistic paths towards convergence between the PC and the TV.
