Netgear unveils Internet TV Player, Digital Entertainer Elite with CinemaNow

by Ross Miller, posted Jan 7th 2009 at 4:38PM

We've now got a content provider giving support to Netgear's Digital Entertainer Elite, and that honor goes to CinemaNow. At today's overly-enthusiastic press conference -- seriously, they threw apples, footballs, and a beer can at certain points -- the company showed off the pay-per-view service on both the aforementioned media streamer as well as the new, much smaller Internet TV Player that's coming this summer for $199. It's very lightweight and has an HDMI output alongside two USB 2.0 ports. It's got YouTube support as well as North American, Europe, and Asia internet TV. The upscaled video looked good, although nothing that's gonna replace your HDTV anytime soon. One very nice feature is support for torrents that you can trigger remotely for download to the player (presumably on an attached disk drive here, as there's no internal storage from what we can tell). No word on codec support, but if they're touting torrents, we're hoping for at least some DivX / XviD and MKV love. The much larger and heavier granddaddy Elite, whos specs we've already heard care of the FCC, is coming February for $399. A fun little feature touted in the presser allows you to pause a video on one TV and watch it on another -- provided you've got a separate Elite unit connected to each. The bad news? Neither device supports Hulu or Netflix, although a rep told us that they're kinda sorta looking into adding the latter sometime in the future.