The coolest news to come out of CES this year so far could be Gefen’s plans to introduce a way to run HDMI over coax.

The commenters over at Gizmodo all seem to see this as a way of replacing HDMI to save a few bucks on cables, but they’re not looking at the big picture!

Right now if you want to watch HD from cable or satellite you need to put a converter/decoder box on each TV. Sure, you can mount a slick flat panel TV high up on your bedroom wall, but what about that stupid ugly box?

This development could potentially enable you to throw all of those unwieldy, unsightly boxes in an dark, unused corner of your home – the garage, maybe! – while using your home’s existing coax to feed HD signals to all of your TVs.

All of this depends, of course, on Gefen’s solution being a lightweight, inline balun-like product on the TV side of things. If it’s just going to be another box then there’s really not much point to it for a residential application, is there?