This holiday season it’s time to step up to the next level of home entertainment.  Today’s network media players and network TVs, Blu-ray Disc players, and network AV home theater receivers, can find the music, movies and photos on your computers and media servers to play on your TV. Sharing photos and enjoying your media from the comfort of your couch sure beats gathering around your computer.

They also can stream videos from movie and TV websites like Netflix, Hulu Plus, Blockbuster On Demand, Cinema Now, Amazon On Demand. And they can stream music from Pandora, Napster, and a number of internet radio station sites, and they can access photos from Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket and many more sites.  They can even connect to your Facebook and Twitter accounts so you can share with friends without having to go back to your computer.

And it’s all easier than ever.  Usually, you plug in an Ethernet cable or connect wirelessly to your home network and connect the device to your TV (or connect the network TV of Blu-ray Disc player directly to the network), and you are ready to choose your photo folders, music playlists or downloaded movies.

Learn more about what is a network media player.

Here’s a list of the best network media player choices this holiday.

Here’s a list of the best network TVs and home theater components this holiday.

Be sure to check out what you need before setting up your network media player

Then check out what accessories you may want to accompany the network media player gift.

You’ll notice from these articles that I am the contributing writer about network media players for about.com

Look around and let me know what you would like me to write about.