I've recently set up a HTPC running XBMC and it's pretty great. Support for Netflix is finally pretty seamless, even on Linux running Pipelight. There's also a lot of other plugins scraping various web sites, and even support for live streaming from the file sharing networks.

And of course XBMC supports streaming over a network with a nice library browser.

Here's my HTPC:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=176709