Digg.com and Revision3 founder Kevin Rose has been putting together a new home theater system and filming live-streaming videos of himself doing it. So is he going plasma or LCD?

Neither, he’s anchoring his system with an HD projector, the Panasonic PT-AE2000U. The projector delivers a 1080p HD picture at 1500 lumens and a 16,000:1 contrast ratio and is currently going for $2700 on Amazon.com (review of projector). To complement it, he’s mounting a large motorized projector screen on the wall. There seems to be a large window right next to the screen–is he concerned about light washing out the picture?

For a receiver, he’s going with a high-end Denon (model unknown). Connected to it are a Series 3 HD TiVO and an Apple TV.

He didn’t stint on the speakers. He’s got a pair of Klipsch XF-48 floor-standing speakers ($1249 each) along with a Klipsch subwoofer and center channel. His rear speakers were not shown, but with his good friend Jack Buser from Dolby there to help him set things up, I’m sure he’s got things covered. Or is that center speaker doubling for the surround sound duties?

Rough estimated cost of Kevin’s current setup?

Projector: $2700.
Projector screen: $700.
Denon receiver: $1200.
Series 3 HD TiVO: $660.
Klipsch right and left floor standing speaker: $2500 ($1249 each).
Klipsch subwoofer: $500.
Klipsch center speaker: $450.
Apple TV: $330.
Professional installation: free

Total: $9040

Kevin’s Qik videos: 1, 2.

*Update from Kevin* Mr. Rose says he does have the surround sound system, the XF-48 Home Theater System. Also, his Denon Receiver is the AVR-4308CI.

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You don’t need to have HD cable television in order to record high def content with an HD TiVO. The Series 3 HD TiVO is capable of recording local HD broadcasts picked up from an antenna. In fact, local over-the-air HD might be the only HD version of some television shows or sporting events available to viewers. This can be the case when the local cable provider has not upgraded their infrastructure to supply the channel in HD. Many people could not watch the last Super Bowl in HD for this reason.

The wide availability and abundance of over-the-air HD content , and the fact that it’s free, is one reason for the recent surge in antenna sales, as noted in a recent Newsweek article. Over-the-air HD broadcasts also have less compression than cable HD content, which can be important when suffering the double whammy of the broadcaster’s compression and the TiVO’s compression.

If you don’t have cable television but receive enough local digital broadcast channels, the Series 3 TiVO is still a great purchase. It can increase the amount of HD content available to you whenever you want it. If you compare the long-term savings of dropping cable television against the cost of an HD TiVO along with a Blu-ray player and  Netflix  and an XBOX 360 or Apple TV, you’ll save money by going for a pay-per-content model rather than cable television’s subscription model. The HD TiVo also allows you to download some digital content as well when combined with an Internet connection.