At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week, networking hardware maker Netgear unveils two new Internet-connected set-top boxes.

Netgear’s product launch comes amid a flurry of announcements and launches of other Internet-ready televisions and digital video players and recorders: the Roku digital video player‘s partnership with Amazon, Netflix-enabled televisions, among others.

The company says the pair of Netgear TV boxes promise to “bring the world of Internet videos, live Internet TV, YouTube, popular websites, HD media collections, family photos, music and more to the TV.”

Hmmmmm. Just like the Apple TV box we’ve had in the TV room for the longest time.

“Internet video consumption is at an all-time high,” said Vivek Pathela, Netgear vice president and general manager of home/consumer products. “Just in the month of October 2008 alone, comScore estimated that almost half of the total U.S. population viewed more than 13.5 billion online videos. That’s a large number of Internet videos, that are viewed mostly on PCs, even though many people would rather watch them on their TVs.”

Netgear’s Internet TV Player (ITV2000) “is a compact, easy-to-use, “plug in and go” Internet set-top device with a simple remote control that enables viewers to catch up on the world of Internet videos including YouTubeâ„¢, live Internet TV, popular Internet video websites, premium video-on-demand and online video searches retrieving billions of Internet videos from a place it was previously unavailable — the TV in their living rooms. Rather than watching videos on PC screens in separate rooms, families can watch video from a variety of Internet sources on the TV together, in the comfort of their den or family room.” The size of a deck of cards, the compact Internet TV Player connects to the home network and the Internet via Ethernet or wireless USB adapter. It does not require a PC to play Internet video, nor does it require installing any PC software or setting up file sharing or firewall settings.

The Internet TV Player is expected to be commercially available later this summer.

The other new Netgear set-top box, the Digital Entertainer Elite (EVA9150), was designed with more serious video enthusiasts in ming. The device comes with an integrated 500GB hard drive, easily upgradeable to larger capacity disks. Consumers can play “Blu-Ray” quality 1080p video on their TVs, high-resolution digital photos, MP3s and recorded television shows from their PCs or from networked storage. The box can also be used to access Internet content, such as YouTube, Internet radio, Flickrâ„¢, RSS feeds, and videos from popular websites. The Digital Entertainer Elite finds all digital media files on the home network and organizes them into a media library.

This more high-powered box can work simultaneously with Windows, Mac and Linux computers, and Networked Attached Storage (NAS) devices (which Netgear happens to manufacture).The device also supports many file formats and video codecs.

The Digital Entertainer Elite also comes with two USB ports, three of Netgear internal antennas and Dual-Band wireless.

The Digital Entertainer Elite is expected to be available in February.