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  • brian
  • Member Since Jul 11th, 2008
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Recent Comments:

Olivier:

Do you really want to buy 3 mac minis to cover all the TVs in your house? Do you really want yet another STB cluttering up your living room? ZvBox works across coax and allows you to watch Internet or local media on any HDTV in the house. There is nothing in the living room but a sexy, new multi-media ZvRemote. ZvBox is spouse-proof!

:-)

-Brian from ZeeVee
Hi guys. This is Brian from ZeeVee and I am monitoring this thread. A few answers:

1) Our current chip/platform will be able to deliver reliable reproduction of internet/computer video up to 1080i resolution. HD over coax is no problem, as most of you picked up that there is plenty of "room" on your home coax using MPEG-2 (you guessed it!). I am in the beta program and it looks awesome. We have about 50 reviewers that will be getting units soon, but if you want a sneak peak check out newteevee.com and ehomeupgrade.com coverage from the Connections show: http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/2008/06/25/zvbox-demo-at-connections-2008/ and http://newteevee.com/2008/06/30/ntv-demos-the-zv/

2) Most of you got that the break-through here is being able to get any content your computer can "see" through VGA; uses existing home coax so no new wiring or wirless setup/interference/complexity (though you might need to use the splitter we give you to split around your STB/HDMI so your new Zv channel gets added to your cable line-up); no new STB at each TV (makes the wife happy and saves $$$), and a very cool ZvRemote/Zviewer combo that lets you control your computer from 150 feet away, has an imbedded laptop touchpad, and multi-media controls, and ingests RSS feeds to natively launch content from the best sites on the web (Hulu, Joost, ABC, CBS, Fox, Mojo, StumbleUpon, etc.) but you can add your own; and finally allows you to do web browsing, check email, and other deskptop apps. Oh, and no new subscription fees.

3) So ZvBox is kind of a "super-box" that combines AppleTV, Roku/Netflix, MediaCenter, HP MediaSmart, LG, that plays HD content, is completely open, and does not charge you any subscription fees. How much would you pay to eliminate all that clutter and not be restricted by limited content menus? Is there anyone on this thread willing to do a cost comparison for a whole house solution to let's say 3 TVs for what they would have to spend (with AppleTV, Media Extender, etc.) to achieve a subset of all this functionality (make sure to calculate what you might pay for movie downloads per month versus what is already free online). Requirements also include the ability to start/stop content from any HDTV, web browsing, Dolby Digital audio, etc. Any takers?

Other answers:

Moe: We do have beta users on satellite but it can be a little tricky on setup and usage (switching inputs, etc. and a variety of reasons I won't go into here) but I am sure the folks on this site can figure it out :-)

Earthling: You are exactly right there are some tuning trade-offs with frame-rate, latency etc. As the marketing guy I can't give you the exact specs, but our engineers have done a fine job and the resolution looks great. Zviewer also comes with a resolution wizard to help you adjust your screen to the best resolution/position on your TV. Current ZvBox is a single QAM channel right now.

Will: I would be playing Unreal Tournament with you too but there is slight delay that could effect how quickly you react when I sneak up behind you with a particle blaster. Not a problem for most online games (e.g., poker) and strategic or educational PC games, but might put you at a disadvantage where a few ms matter most. This latency is not noticable for video playing, web browsing, etc.

That's it for now. I hope I answered most of your questions.
Let the hive mind of Engadget get that for you.
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