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Haier, Metalink show off draft-n-equipped TVs
It's been over a year since we first spotted Metalink's draft-802.11n components designed for networked home theater gear, and now it seems that the company has finally found a partner willing to include the technology in a slew of next-generation products. Known as WLANPlus, the chipset family is poised for integration into TVs, DVRs, and DVD players from Chinese manufacturing giant Haier -- perhaps best know around here for the pen-like P7 cellphone -- which will allow consumers to broadcast multiple high definition streams around the house thanks to draft-n transfer speeds in excess of 200Mbps. The two companies revealed their partnership at this year's SINOCES, where Haier had several WiFi-equipped TVs on display in a multi-room setup meant to simulate simultaneous streaming in a household environment. GigaOM points out, however, that it may be awhile before we see actual products stemming from this deal hit the marketplace -- if we ever see them at all -- as Metalink doesn't seem to be in the best financial shape, having already lost $4.1 million in the first quarter of this year alone.[Via GigaOM]
CE-Oh no he didn't! Part XI - ABC exec takes on DVRs
We know that as a network executive, ABC's President of Advertising Sales Mike Shaw has a vested interest in the survival of the traditional 30-second commercial, but his recent assertion that consumers don't really care about the ad-skipping functionality of their DVRs strikes us as being way off the mark. Following ABC's latest rate-setting powwow with advertisers, or upfront, Shaw opined that he wasn't sure "the driving reason to get a DVR in the first place is just to skip commercials," and that the appeal of such devices "really is just a matter of convenience -- so you don't miss your favorite show." He even went so far as to say that he "would love it if the MSO's...would disable the fast-forward [button]" on their next generation of set-top boxes, suggesting that "people can understand in order to have convenience and on-demand, that you can't skip commercials." Once again, we follow the logic here -- commercials do help keep programs we enjoy on the air -- but instead of embittering folks by forcing them to sit through ads, maybe Shaw should encourage his advertising partners to follow KFC's lead and create spots that people actually want to watch. Remember, Mike, that'll you'll catch more flies with delicious honey than the sour vinegar you're currently trying to force down our throats.
Sony BDP-S1 delayed again... until October 25
It's delayed, it's not delayed, it's delayed -- further. That's right, Sony's BDP-S1, the Blu-ray player subject to a delayed news reaction over its quiet shove into an August launch timeframe, was today discovered to once again be pushed back, this time until late October. We can't confirm whether this release demotion is also going to affect the Japanese launch of the player, but this old song is getting pretty sad. We know Sony wants to get the player right before they push it out the door (while also protecting their margins and ensuring supply, etc.), but at this point we're going to be less than surprised if the launch date "accidentally" slips past the PlayStation 3, which Sony may stick us with in order to better to parade their big Blu-ray push around the nascent console.[Via HD Beat, thanks, Randy and Josh]
Unboxing the Samsung BD-P1000
Life sure is good in The Man Room. First these guys got a hold of Toshiba's HD-A1 HD DVD player before almost anyone else, and now they've also managed to score a Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray unit a full six days before the official release, capturing the entire unboxing process for us to enjoy. Since the first Blu-ray titles won't go on sale until tomorrow, initial impressions are limited to the player's design, menu layout, and upscaling abilities, with the HD-A1's output used as a reference point in the latter category. The good news here is that the 500 extra bucks you'll have to spend to pick up the Samsung do indeed give you a few initial advantages over the Tosh, such as the snazzier packaging (big deal), more attractive case, and perhaps most importantly, significantly faster startup and load times. On the downside, the HD-A1 showed slightly better upconverting abilities than the Blu-ray model, and The Man Room also experienced a rather unnerving shrinking and flickering of the menus when connecting to a 1080i projector. As for us, we're gonna wait until some reviews start showing up online before we decide to either shell out the cash or wait for the Sony, the Pioneer, or maybe even the PS3 to come out. Keep reading to check out the remote and a shot of the main menu...
Minor league baseball offering free Father's Day TiVos
Just because Father's Day is half over and you still haven't gone out and picked up a present for dear old dad, doesn't mean that you have to suffer through yet another year of cold stares from the man himself and taunting from the rest of the family. Thanks to TiVo, you can still stay in Dad's good graces by taking him to one of 25 minor league baseball matches around the country tonight (click the Read link for a complete list), where select teams will each be giving away free Series 2 boxes to the first 1,000 male parents who walk through the gates. Well, by free, TiVo means that you have to sign up for a one-year service agreement at $155 -- what, did you think they were gonna give away the service too? -- but that's still an $84 savings over buying the same bundled package in the store. Even better, if your dad has decided to boycott the American Pastime due to Major League Baseball's hard line on placeshifting its games, you can still take advantage of this deal from the comfort of your home by signing up online.
Zalman's HD 160XT HTPC enclosure with 7-inch LCD
If you were into that Okoro OMS-LX100 HTPC we brought you the other day, but don't want to spend thousands of dollars on a machine just to get a snazzy embedded touchscreen, Zalman's got a new enclosure that will let you build your own system for considerably less dough. Sure to be the envy of all your home theater-fanatic buddies, the HD 160XT sports a 7-inch touchscreen for menu control, media information, and even video previewing, along with four open HDD bays, two optical drive slots, a pair of supposedly silent exhaust fans, and of course, the obligatory remote. Available in black or silver, we sure wouldn't mind building a system around this case and displaying it proudly in our gear rack, but unfortunately we have no idea when or where these will be available.
Samsung BD-P1000 Blu-ray player delayed (again)?
In what may turn out to be yet another crushing blow to HD-hungry consumers, it looks like Samsung could be joining Sony, Pioneer, and, um, itself, in playing the Vista-like Blu-ray delay game that continues to amuse and frustrate us. As of right now, the facts are these: UK tech site Pocket-Lint sent an email to Bite Communications, Samsung's British PR firm, in order to confirm what we all thought was the BD-P1000's June 25th release date; instead of a confirmation, however, Pocket-Lint received a surprising reply stating that "unfortunately, the release of the Blu-ray has been delayed until September." Before you start freaking out, though, keep in mind that at this point details are still very thin -- we can't even be certain if this supposed delay applies to the US launch, or only affects our friends over in Great Britain. As you'd expect, we have our crack team of low-paid interns furiously dialing every Samsung representative we can find a number for, and you'll be the first to know when we can finally pin someone down on a solid release date, so stay tuned.Update: Whew, good news (well, for us Americans at least). Samsung has confirmed that the US launch is still "on schedule," although Bite was right on the money about the UK delay, so as usual, Brits are gonna have to wait a little longer to get a hot new product.
Pioneer's Elite VSX-80TXV, 81TXV, 82TXS, and 84TXSi receivers
Pioneer launched a slew of HDTV and home entertainment gear this week, not the least of which being their 1080p switching Elite receiver series. Models VSX-80TXV, VSX-81TXV, VSX-82TXS, and VSX-84TXSi have 1, 2, 3, and 4 HDMI source ports, the top two models featuring a Genesis DCDi Faroudja video scaler, iPod integration, XM Connect & Play, and even a USB port on the VSX-84TXSi. Expect to pay between $650 and $1,500, depending on your options and features.
Cablevision postpones networked DVR
Under heavy pressure in the form of a lawsuit filed by nearly all of TV land's major content providers, industry giant Cablevision has announced that it will delay the rollout of its networked DVR offering until the service's legality is confirmed in court. The lawsuit, filed by the four key networks and their parent studios, claims that Cablevision's plan to store customers' recorded swag on their own servers as opposed to local set-top boxes constitutes a retransmission of copyrighted material, and therefore violates pre-existing agreements the company has with its providers. Cablevision, on the other hand, argues that networked DVR services are only facilitating "fair-use" of their broadcasts by consumers, who have already paid for any programs they intend to record. The outcome of this suit will be closely monitored by other players in the cable industry as well, because a victory for Cablevision would allow Cox, Comcast, et al. to begin offering their own remote storage -- good news for consumers, but perhaps bad news for our old friend TiVo.
Pioneer ejects DVD recorder business
The invisible hand of capitalism has pushed yet another major electronics manufacturer from one of its traditional businesses, as declining profits and product commodification have convinced Pioneer Corp. to drop out of the DVD recorder game. Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun is reporting that its recording division's recent cash hemorrhaging has convinced the company which "pioneered" the commercial burner to cut its losses and form a strategic partnership with Panasonic-parent Matsushita, whose next-gen optical disc technology may help Pioneer succeed in the decidedly less-crowded Blu-ray recorder market. Pioneer will now begin to shift its focus to its more profitable in-vehicle electronics division, which is responsible for many of the popular navigation and in-dash entertainment products on the worldwide market.
Movie downloading kiosks may be coming soon
In what could turn into a preemptive strike against the further decline of DVD sales in the face of competition from digital downloads as well as Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs, major retailers may soon be installing kiosks in their stores that give customers access to on-demand, feature-length films on DVD or their portable devices. According to Reuters, the major movie studios are reportedly in talks with retail heavyweights like Wal-mart to theoretically offer their complete archives for downloading to in-store terminals with high-speed connections, where they would either be burned onto DVD or transferred to unspecified devices, a la that proposed DVD Station service we saw awhile back (which seemingly never materialized). While the prospect of having immediate access to almost every movie ever made is admittedly appealing, we're not really sure that we want to drive all the way over to Best Buy just to stand around waiting uncomfortably with our fellow patrons as we all clutch our iPods, nervously tap our feet, and wish we'd all just stayed at home and settled for whatever was on Moviebeam.[Via Slashdot]
Digital Deck releases Media Connector media extender
There's definitely no shortage of media extender options on the market, but that isn't stopping Digital Deck from releasing a new solution that not only manages the digital content on your PC, but plays nice with TiVo as well for viewing your recorded swag all over the house. Make that a small house, because the Media Connector box (or boxes, if you're doing the multi-room thing) gets its data over an old-fashioned wired Ethernet connection, meaning that there's no place for this system in the sprawling Engadget Mansion. Apartment dwellers, however, may find this setup to be just what they're looking for, as the included Media Center software promises to make controlling your gear a breeze, allowing you to seamlessly stream live and recorded content, plus flickr photos, back and forth among your various pieces of equipment. On the specs tip, the set top box can handle MPEG-2, MP3, WMA, AAC, and AC-3 formats, features component and digital audio hookups along with the obligatory composite and S-Video jacks, and will set you back a cool $500 plus $300 for each additional room you want to connect.[Via eHomeUpgrade]
The Clicker: YouTube's win-win-win
Every week Stephen Speicher contributes The Clicker, an opinion column on entertainment and technology:Recently we talked about the upstart sensation, YouTube. As a social phenomenon and a growing entity, YouTube's rise to glory has been nothing short of meteoric. In just one year YouTube has taken its business from zero to pumping out more than 35 Million streams per day, and it's still growing. That's pretty darn impressive, but, as the immortal Rod Tidwell once said, "Show me the money!" You see -- there's a fairly developed pattern when it comes to replacing existing media outlets with their internet counterparts. The first step is to see if people will buy what you're selling when the cost is zero. YouTube has clearly been successful in that regard. In fact, their success has even convinced media giant AOL to create their own (nearly) feature-for-feature knock-off (see: http://communityvideo.aol.com/). [Disclaimer: this publication's parent company is owned by AOL.]However, using venture capital money to subsidize the trafficking of copyrighted material is just the first step. Eventually, the fledgling business will have to hit step two: making money. It's there where the wheat is separated from the chaff. It's there where we find out if a new medium will enjoy long-term success or fizzle away like the pet rock. Take blogs for instance: While blogs began as simple online personal journals, it didn't take long for enterprising souls to recognize that blogs held much more power than simply sharing your cat's diet with your 12 "readers." Yes, the majority of the blogs out there are still "by the people for the people." Yet, the medium has also spawned quite a few commercial sites (this site included). It's this commercialization that ensures the future of the medium.But where is YouTube's legitimization? More specifically, where is the path to profitability? Millions of streams per day is quite impressive, but it's also quite expensive. Estimates for YouTube's traffic have been pegged as high as 200TB per day. No, that 'T' was not a typo; that's Terabytes. Bandwidth costs alone most likely approach one million dollars a month. Add on top of that the cost of running a service as massive as YouTube's, and you quickly come to the same conclusion: It's time for YouTube to stop growing and start making money.
Cox Communications mulling partnership with TiVo?
It's been over a year since we launched the TiVo Deathwatch, and not only is the company still alive and kicking, a new survey being conducted by Cox Communications may indicate that TiVo is about to enter into a partnership with the nation's third largest cable company. Thomas Hawk reports that users on on the TiVo Community Forum are buzzing about a questionnaire that was sent to Cox Enterprises customers who currently subscribe to one or more of the company's other services, but get their TV via satellite. Among a slew of questions about DVRs in general and TiVo specifically, is one which reads in part, "If Cox were to offer digital cable service with a TiVo branded DVR for about the same price as you are currently paying for satellite service each month, how likely would you be to switch from satellite TV to Cox cable that featured this TiVo branded DVR service?" Take this for what you will, but these questions would seem to indicate that the two companies are, at the very least, involved in backroom talks of some sort, and possibly even in the planning stages of building co-branded equipment. Combined with TiVo's recent courtroom victory over EchoStar, their current partnership with Comcast, and a surprising renewal of their service contract with DirecTV, a deal with Cox may be just the ammo we need to put the Deathwatch down for good.
The Clicker: YouTube and fair use, a match made in heaven
Every week Stephen Speicher contributes The Clicker, an opinion column on entertainment and technology:Riddle me this: what do you get when you combine a nifty little piece of Flash software, some backend mojo, an army of cellphone-toting teens, and one "Lazy Sunday" clip? The answer is, of course, the largest online video streaming service on the planet, YouTube. While YouTube is preparing to celebrate just its first birthday, the upstart media company is already changing the face of the web. Modern surfers won't surf long without running into the seemingly ubiquitous YouTube player. Whether it's being used by the politicos pointing to Stephen Colbert's all-out Blitzkrieg on the President or, on the lighter side, by budding young directors, actors, and athletes eager to show off their Ninja Skillz, Light Saber Skillz, or Soccer Skillz, YouTube is quickly becoming the micro-content provider to beat. YouTube's traffic (well over 30 million streams per day) bests its nearest competitor, Yahoo, by 100 percent. Other giants such as Google and AOL lag even further behind. The secret to YouTube's big success? Thinking small. While other players spent the bulk of their time and effort courting the media giants and their large video catalogs. YouTube courted, well, you. More specifically, YouTube made it ridiculously easy to upload and post videos shot on cell phones, camcorders, etc. This led to an explosion of both their viewership and their “catalog.” It's this grassroots support that's led to the company's phenomenal growth.
Switched On: Pandora's Box (Part 2)
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about the future of technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment:Last week's column discussed Slim Devices' elegant Squeezebox hardware, its versatile but complex server software, and SqueezeNetwork, the companion online service through which the hardware accesses the Pandora music recommendation service. Pandora is considered by some to be a "Web 2.0" site -- the blanket term we're all aware of referring to a startup that generates more RSS than revenue.But Pandora's recommendation engine is the best I've tried. Unlike many others, it doesn't rely directly on the purchase behavior or music ownership of other people, be they friends or fellow customers. Rather, it leverages data from the Music Genome Project, a collaboration begun in 2000 to classify music via its attributes. In fact, some criticize Pandora for being "too good" at matching a song's style, and while there is a case that Pandora should include a control for how strictly it should match a given song or artist, users can at least create up to 100 different channels and diversify them by adding names of songs or artists to the mix.Pandora can offer a depth of detail as to which musical attributes it chose when recommending a song. However, it doesn't seem to account for at least some important factors, such as the qualities of a singer's voice. Pandora offers a free tier of service, but access via SqueezeNetwork requires a subscription, which costs between $3 and $4 per month. The low subscription price is worth it for at least a few months, but Pandora needs to greatly expand its catalog to keep subscribers interested. Fortunately, Squeezebox owners get a three-month trial of the premium service, a $12 value.
Sonos ZP100 system reviewed
Looks like HomeTheaterView got themselves a hold of a couple of Sonos ZP100s and a controller and put the spurs to 'em to see how the system works and performs in a real home environment. We have a Sonos we're currently checking out (expect more on that soon), but HomeTheaterView found the devices to work admirably out of box with a clean, labor-free setup, and simple, intuitive interface, which we won't deny. The concept behind the Sonos isn't a terribly complicated one, so outside decent codec support, wireless range, and the aforementioned (setup and interface / use), there's not a lot else to look for in an in-home wireless audio distribution system. Fortunately the Sonos nails the codecs (outside not supporting PlaysForSure), but while the range wasn't mentioned, and they wished there were versions outfitted for in-wall installs and wetter environs like bathrooms, they seemed to find the system an excellent choice that fulfills a need otherwise unmet by the other out of box consumer home audio distribution systems on the market.
High powered TV-B Gone sniping hack
You know, we can't really imagine what kind of social setting you'd be in that would require the use of a TV-B-Gone and still be socially acceptable to carry binoculars, but if you're especially annoyed with your neighbor (whose TV happens to be relatively near and have line of sight), check out this simple TV-B Gone sniper hack. One TV-B-Gone plus one pair binoculars (monocular might also well work) equals some serious range -- about 40 feet according to the hack's creator. Anyone want to try this thing with a high powered home telescope? Forget WiFi-ing to other States, this week we're all about turning off TVs in the next time zone.[Via Make Blog]
TiVo's Series2 DT 80 and 180 hour dual tuner boxes
Remember the dual tuner TiVos we heard about a few weeks back? Well, surprise, surprise, they're real and are more or less exactly as called. The two models feature a single cable / RF in jack with internal splitter, which allows you to record two analog programs simultaneously, or one analog and one tuned from your digital cable box. Beside the fact that now your TiVo now has dual tuners, it (freaking finally) has integrated Ethernet; starting May 1st you can expect to pony up $199.99 for the 180-hour TCD649180, or $99.99 for the 80-hour TCD649080, both after $150 rebate and service activation. Baby steps to the Series3, patience people.
HP Pavilion m7360y, Viiv reviewed, called jive
Here we are, four months since Intel promised a new home entertainment computing revolution the likes of which we'd never seen in the form of Viiv. Sure, no one -- including Intel -- could really figure out what the hell Viiv was, but they successfully convinced a lot of people that it's a brand they needed to see represented in their next PC. Well, according to the Washington Post, who recently spent some serious time with as mature a Viiv product as exists in the form of an HP Pavilion m7360y, the platform "amounts to a smattering of free Web video clips and discounts on online music, movie and game rentals -- plus a nifty rainbow-hued Viiv sticker on the front of the computer." They too couldn't define Viiv, and even called the Intel's much lauded Quick Resume feature as being akin to switching off your display and speakers -- nothing more. Not that we're really surprised, but it's pretty harsh when people start accusing your seemingly directionless platform initiatives as "embarrassing [your]self."
