Want to watch a video in your home by downloading it? With this week's announcements from Sony and Microsoft, there is now a whole suite of video download products to choose from.

For years we have had iTunes and the ability to pay $2 to watch a streaming episode of TV on our favorite Mac or PC. Apple has also offered AppleTV, a piece of hardware that lets you watch iTunes content on your TV without using a laptop or computer.

Amazon's Unbox offers a video service which uses downloads rather than streaming. It allows purchases but only on PC's. This year they will add a streaming version that works on Mac or PC.

A year ago, Netflix announced a download service as well. It is limited to Windows PC using the IE6 browser (because of DRM technology) but content is essentially free to watch. More recently Netflix announced a partnership with Roku to offer a $99 hardware device similar to AppleTV.

Microsoft has had a download service on the Xbox and has now announced a partnership with Netflix.

In addition to all these products, there are also several small companies offering hardware devices for watching video on TV's that pull content from a LAN or off the Internet.

Its a lot of smoke but will any of these services catch fire?

As a Netflix customer, their service sounds great, at least in principle. The details are less exciting and illustrate the difficulties companies have in this area.

While iTunes is free to use (you pay only for the content), with the Netflix/Xbox service you have to pay Netflix a monthly fee and you have to pay Microsoft for Live just to use the service. You may pay even more for any content. Worse, the user experience requires both a browser on a PC and an Xbox. You have to use the Netflix website to queue up content before you can watch on it the Xbox.

I have tried the Netflix service but stopped using it because it forces me to leave my media program and use IE. (The picture quality was poor and the selection was small were other problems.) If Microsoft drops the fee for Live, I will try the Xbox service but so far I have not seen a video on demand product that I actually want to use. Maybe Amazon will add a plugin for SageTV? Maybe Sony will offer a great service with the PS3?

Maybe 2009.