Great post.

I, too, am in the old-school "why not just browse and play files on a network share (export) directory" camp.

However I can see three potential, personal uses for streaming.

1) Access to my media over a slow connection, possibly through firewalls. (If i ever get umts flatrate or feel the need to watch my media from a friend's house).

2) Transcoding my old stored xvid/divx videos that would not play back natively on the 770.

3) Capturing/Transcoding livetv and controlling a pvr through the nokia.

Oh and just thought of one more advantage - playing random-play music off a network share with thousands of files would incur high start-up times and memory usage on the 770 client, if it tried indexing all of the data before beginning playback.

I suppose all the media-streaming savvy people are laughing at this post right now for mentioning the obvious.

Old farts like me don't eagerly change habits or paradigms, and we tend to dislike fat, bloated, feature-overloaded solutions to problems we didn't know we had.