SBC and 2Wire planning a mother of a set-top box
posted January 3rd 2005 2:13PM
The big story of the day might be TiVoToGo, but as our buddy Om Malik notes, SBC and 2Wire's announcement of a new joint venture called SBC Media Solutions is potentially a much bigger deal than the news of TiVo's new service (which is more than a day late and a dollar short, innit?) Yes, it's more or less a convergence play, but essentially what they're rolling out is a new set-top box/digital media server which combines a satellite TV receiver with a DSL modem for connecting to the Internet and a hard drive for recording TV shows and storing (and streaming) your music and digital photo collections. You have to subscribe to both SBC Dish Network and SBC Yahoo! DSL, but there are some upsides, like that 2Wire's MediaPortal technology will let you remotely access your photos and music and program the DVR from a web browser (they're working on a version that'll work with Cingular cellphones). They don't mention whether there is support for remotely accessing or sharing video content, so we're assuming that you won't be able to do any of that, but you will be able to do stuff like pause live TV in one room and start watching it in another or watch recorded TV shows on any TV connected to the network. The box itself looks pretty sweet, too: a 250GB hard drive that can record up to 180 hours of regular TV or 25 hours of HDTV and a built-in CD/DVD drive. Should launch sometime around the middle of the year or so.
I've had Dish network for years. This sounds like something I would seriously check out if not for the fact that SBC Yahoo DSL is not available in my area.
i've had sbc yahoo for a good while now. overall its prety good.
i rarely use the yahoo part, but it does come in handy every once in a while (it has movie showtimes for every theater in my area, for example)
the sbc part is basic dsl. the router works as advertised and only hickups about once every 6 months. rebooting it (about 1-2 mins) usualy makes everything all better.
i'm happy with it for the price.
i dont have dish network because i rarely watch tv.
That's a killer box:
1) Satellite
2) PVR
3) HDTV decoder
4) DVD player
5) Media extender
6) Web TV
That certainly clears out my entertainment center! The only thing that comed close to that feature set is a Windows XP Media Center pc that you build yourself, and even then it doesn't do satellite or non-OTA HDTV.
We all should be impressed.
I have been kicking around the notion of booting my cable company (tv and internet at a cost of almost $100/mo.) and this set-top box has put me over the top. I will be calling SBC tomorrow morning and subscribing to their plan. I can't wait to get my hands on this little jewel of a media item.