Interesting article in today's New York Times about the lowly set-top box that brings TV into our homes today (or at least a large part of U.S. homes today) is undergoing a transformation.

(At least by what was shown by companies like Motorola at CES earlier this month.)

Now while the article goes on to describe how this box is now being looked on to do more -- record shows on an internal hard drive, etc. -- why doesn't someone think of making these things look any better?

They are usually black and ugly -- how about some color?

Or better yet, how about some enterprising company developing skins for these things? 

We've got skins for Xbox and the like so why not this piece of gadget hardware?