Buffalo HD VOD set-top; is a new trend emerging?

Buffalo introduced a high-def VOD box in the Far East and we noticed a few things. Right of the bat, there's no reason to assume that we'll see this box from Buffalo here in the States, however, they do sell multimedia and wireless networking products here. Clearly, based on the D1 outputs, this set-top shown above is for the Japanese market. It's interesting to note that the logo on the front looks a bunch like the li'l TiVo dude, but again, that's just a casual observation. The real interesting aspect to this is the apparent trend building for high-def on demand via the Internet.

MovieBeam hit us two weeks ago, but Disney opted for an analog spectrum signal to gather up all of those HD bits and bytes. Now we see Buffalo with a device that uses the much faster broadband method. If this keeps up, pre-packaged content in the form of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray might have a very short shelf life.

Is this the beginning of the newest trend? If so, what's Microsoft doing with their WMCE platform which clearly has similar capabilities like this box from Buffalo and the others that are sure to follow? Better yet: will the TiVo Series 3 include support for high-def broadband downloads? Let the speculation begin...