SBC and 2Wire planning a mother of a set-top box
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.
