Wireless revolutionized home and business networks. The ability to beam data from a router to a laptop or PC many yards away without any physical connection changed everyone's expectations about what was possible. Just as importantly, it made home networking easier for the average user. Figuring out where to plug wires can be difficult to a home user looking at the rear of a Dell with two or three places to put an Ethernet jack, and becomes infinitely more complex when connecting two devices in different rooms.
Now, with wireless networking well established, the same concept is being applied to devices beyond desktops and laptops. Game consoles were probably the earliest examples of this wireless expansion, as they allowed people to buy all kinds of content and stream it via a wireless network connection. Now, HDTVs are looking to jump on the bandwagon. It may sound fanciful, as video is well known to consume large amounts of bandwidth. Video also reacts poorly if the stream of incoming data is temporarily broken or weakened. But the potential of this technology is great. Imagine if your HDTV required no connection physical connection besides the power cord. Such a thing may seem like magic, but we're already seeing the earliest implementations of this tech.
Although wireless HDMI is only recently starting to gain press, the fundamentals are nothing new. The standards are no different for Wireless HDMI than for HDMI, but it is only recently the manufacturers have seriously attempted to push the technology. The wireless technology itself is also common. Some wireless HDMI solutions use the 802.11g standard that is used for wireless routers. Many, such as Belkin and Gefen, use custom solutions or less common standards such as UWB, but the basic wireless technology is not advanced even in these proprietary devices.
That said, the technology has to be tweaked in many ways to make wireless HDMI a reality. As mentioned, video is extremely bandwidth intensive. Video also does not like hiccups which cause temporary loss of data. Failure of bandwidth or connection integrity can result in skips in the video stream, and producing a wireless product that can reliably stream high definition content requires specific hardware solutions. It is worth noting that those companies which do use custom solutions rather than using simple 802.11g seem to be putting out much higher quality products. This is likely because the companies using less common wireless standards or a proprietary standard have put more work into addressing the specific concerns of wireless video.