Television PC (ie. Boxee/Hulu), looking for feedbackFollow

I'm seriously considering building myself a Micro-ITX home theater PC to handle online streaming television shows instead of paying for cable. Digital Cable television has just gotten too expensive, and in area's like where I am, we're restricted to a sole service provider (ie. Comcast) which makes it hard to get any type of competitive pricing on packages. My questions are these:

1) What I would build would be HDMI 1080 HD compatible obviously, but is the streaming quality of the content worthy? For instance, do you get odd streaming issues that affect the visual clarity? Digital, for instance, tends to have odd pixelated moments where the image and/or audio goes bonkers for a few minutes without any type of pause, affecting the continuity of the show.

2) With Boxee and/or Hulu, are the variety of shows large? Medium? Small? Growing? I have two primary concerns. I can't get my wife on board unless a certain channel is available. That channel is CW Network. I also would like to know if some other stations (ie. Nick/Noggin/Nick Jr.) are available because we have a toddler.

3) Can you get live broadcasts? Or is everything pre-recorded and on a delay to be able to watch? For example, if I wanted to watch the morning news, would I have to wait until the afternoon for it to be viewable? Or do the networks actually stream the live content through the service?

4) Are there any alternatives better than Boxee and/or Hulu?

I've seen people recently talk about how they have internet television, wondering if anyone here does and can comment.

Ah, ok. I thought I read somewhere (Maximum PC?) that Boxee/XBMC had script/plugin's to stream Hulu content through the softwares media player. I'll have to look into a little more, it seems. Thanks