After a flurry of announcements from Microsoft, Netflix, TiVo, and others touting how their various devices can deliver content to the living room TV, Streamingmedia.com EVP Dan Rayburn crunches the numbers for a little reality check.

Blogging over at GigaOm, Dan figures there are about 19.3 million hardware boxes of various flavors sold which can deliver online video content. It's not a bad number, until you start applying filters on how many people actually have both an Xbox Live and a Netflix account, or take into account the number of households that have later-model Series 3 TiVos capable of accepting broadband feeds.

Adding a SWAG factor, there're about 7.2 million consumer boxes able to access broadband content. Fudge some more to allow for tech-junkie consumers that likely own multiple devices--such as an Xbox 360 and a TiVo and a PS3--to slice the pie down further to around 5.7 million or so unique users.

Depressed yet? Estimate take rates for adoption and long term use to come up with a number of less than 3 million consumers using boxes to bring Internet-hosted video to their TV.

Dan thinks cable companies have a better shot of delivering Internet video to your TV set, even if the video is coming from the Internet. However, Netflix and others are likely not counting on today's numbers, but those five years down the road.

For more:
- Rayburn blogs about video content reaching few [1] users

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