Category: Consumer Electronics

Sling Media gets $46 million in funding

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 31, 2006

You know, I’m usually on top of new tech, first in line, etc. But I gotta be honest with you, I haven’t had much interest in the Sling Box. I understand it’s coolness factor – place shifting television is very cool. I know that if I traveled more, I might actually care more.

Anyhow, I think I started to get it a little more today. There’s nothing like a big cash infusion from Dish Network to realize that this is a pretty cool technology. With Microsoft threatening to enter this business with the update of Windows MCE, Sling will need all the money they can get there hands on.

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(Via Zatz Not Funny. . ..)

DirecTV HTPCs Microsoft PVRs

DirecTV and CableCard on Windows Vista Details

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 30, 2006

Thomas Hawk, digital media enthusiast, has a long write up of his recent blogger’s dinner with Microsoft exec, Jim Allchin. In a turn of events, it looks like DirecTV will have less draconian rules than cable as to how their services will work with PCs.

All CableCard enabled Windows Vista boxes will have to be certified by CableLabs, the organization that created the standard. So, not only will manufacturers have to get certified by CableLabs, but each shipping PC must be certified as well. Basically, it means that you can forget about building a CableCard enabled HTPC yourself. This will make it tougher for smaller manufacturers to build these machines, as well.

On the other hand, DirecTV will allow after market cards to be installed by individuals, rather than buying brand new boxes. This will certainly make DirecTV more attractive to tweakers than cable.

No word on pricing or timing, but there are many details of the hows and whys of satellite and cable and how they integrate with Vista.

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(Via HDBeat.)

PVRs Rumors Tivo

Cisco courting Tivo?

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 30, 2006

CNET is speculating this morning about a potential “partnership” between Cisco and Tivo. Could Cisco be Tivo’s potential white knight? Well, the deal kind of makes sense, but I think that this is someone at CNET’s HQ is not-so-secretely wishing in their heart of hearts that their Tivo won’t go away.

Their rationale is that Cisco has been making a bigger push into consumer electronics, specifically with their acquisitions of cable box maker, Scientific Atlanta, and home networking gear maker, Linksys.

In any case, I’m also not-so-secretly wishing in my heart of hearts that Tivo won’t go away(and that they will ship their CableCard Tivo soon), so we’ll be watching this story closely.

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(Via HD Beat)

Home Entertainment Portable Entertainment Rumors Sony

AIBO, Qualia Roadkill

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 26, 2006

Sony, in a cost cutting effort, has cut the AIBO and Qualia lines from production, according to Akihabara News. I think quite a few geeks will be sad to see the AIBO line die, but few will lament the passing of Sony’s Qualia line.

Qualia, FYI, is Sony’s ultra high end line of consumer electronics. This line includes a $27,000 projector, $12,000 rear projections television, $3300 headphones, and my personal favorite the $3300 2 megapixel digital camera.

The problems withe Qualia brand were not just with prices, but it was incredibly questionable if there was a market for such devices. Sony wasn’t successful in making Qualia truly aspirational products. I mean, if the incredibly rich don’t want them, why would John Q. Public?

Oh well, no one is crying over Qualia, but AIBO lovers, you might consider the Robosapien or some other more-human robot companion.

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Media Servers and Streamers Yahoo

Yahoo! Music makes Linksys plugin

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 26, 2006

For those of you using the Yahoo! Music Engine, you’ve just gotten a little bit of freedom. Similar to Apple’s Airport Express, the Linksys Wireless G Music Bridge plays music in remote locations (read: away from your computer) and Yahoo! has just wrote a plugin that will work with the device.

Not sure if this will be a free download for the folks that already have this device, but new customers will be able to pick up the device for $99 plus Yahoo! will have a $20 rebate (yay, rebates!).

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(Via eHomeUpgrade.)

Apple Downloads iTunes Portable Entertainment

Beavis vs. Cartman on iTMS

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 26, 2006

The announcements keep coming from our friends over at iTunes. Here’s a short list of everything added to iTMS:

MTV – Beavis and Butthead, Jackass, Punk’d, Gauntlet 2, and more
Nickelodeon – Spongebob Squarepants, Dora the Explorer, Zoey 101
Comedy Central – South Park, Drawn Together, Best of Standup

Looks like Apple must have signed a deal with Viacom. Should we expect VH1, Spike, and BET to follow? And what about Comedy Central’s “news” shows, The Daily Show and Colbert Report? Looks like the encoding monkeys in Cupertino have their work cut out for them.

HDTV Home Entertainment

Netflix + HD DVD = Peanut Butter + Chocolate

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 24, 2006

Two great tastes…(ugh, must not post while tired). Looks like you won’t have to rush right out to replace your old shiny discs with new shiny discs after all. Netflix announced they will have both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs when they launch. They don’t expect demand to be too high(I’ll second that), but want to support both formats for early adopters. No word on additional costs, but I haven’t heard anything about the cost of these HD discs.

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(Via eHomeUpgrade.)

Apple Downloads iTunes Portable Entertainment

Oh, and one more thing…

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 24, 2006

Man, no sooner did this deal get done and an Disney’s newest large stockholder is already making some improvements on his investment. Wanna download some Disney shorts for your iPod? 10 new Disney shorts popped on iTMS this afternoon (maybe I should rename this blog iTMSWatch, I spend waaaay too much time there).

Gotta hand it to Stevie for having all his mice… err, ducks in a row.

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Apple Downloads iTunes Portable Entertainment

Ebert and Roeper, Munsters join iTunes

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 24, 2006

Not the most exciting new additions to iTMS, but Apple is furthering their offerings this morning with “Ebert and Roeper” and “The Munsters”. What is interesting here is pricing. While the episodes remain at the oh-so-simple $1.99, the first season of “The Munsters” (38 episodes) will cost you a whopping $54.99 yet the last 20 episodes of E&R is priced at $9.99. So, Apple is placing a premium on less timely or “evergreen” content than on content that will most likely be viewed only once. Makes sense, but I wonder how Ebert and Roeper feel about it? Two thumbs up?

Ebert and Roeper

The Munsters

Apple Macworld Portable Entertainment

Macworld Announcements

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 10, 2006

MacBookPro – same form factor as current, but 4-5x faster. No word on battery life, but this seems to be part of the focus, so we’ll see. Gosh, I wonder what they’ll call the new iBook?

iMac iNtel – didn’t expect this one at all. Not totally sure it makes sense, but it smells like the Apple of old (quadra – centris – powermac) replacing a product a couple of months after they’ve introduced one. Oy, glad I didn’t buy the iMac last fall.

iLife ’06 – this one was an easy one to call. Apple is the company that benefits the most from podcasting at this point and people were shoehorning their apps to do what they wanted for awhile, now they do it out of the box. New iApp – iWeb for website, podcast, vodcast

radio tuner/remote for iPod – cool implementation of a relatively unnecessary feature. Does anyone still listen to terrestrial radio anymore?

More details later. I’m off to go hands on.

CES Home Entertainment

HDMI is pretty

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 8, 2006

and everything else is really, really messy. If you’ve ever taken a look at the back side of my receiver it looks like something that NASA would use to launch rockets. Between 5 cables for audio and 3 for video for one frickin’ source, it makes one wonder if Monster Cable has been subsidizing A/V component development for the last 10 years.

These pictures speak volumes about the simplicity the industry is aspiring to and god, I hope HDMI is powering everything in the next few years.

CES Portable Entertainment

Creative Zen – Don’t buy me

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 7, 2006
1 Comment on Creative Zen – Don’t buy me

I had a long chat with one of the Creative folks and tried really, really hard to like the Creative Zen Vision:M. I mean, how hard could it be to create a usable device that plays music and video. I mean, the iPod is nice and all, but this is easy, right?

WRONG. This device is not intuitive to use, it is heavy and it is thick, all things the iPod is not. When I was done with the Vision:M, they brought me the older model, the Vision to check out. The device was turned off and it took a full minute to boot into a workable state. Call me impatient, but it felt like an eternity compared to the iPod.

Please Creative, make a good media player. Competition is good for the industry.

CES Portable Entertainment Sony

Sony Reader

They Sony booth is always a big pain in the ass, teeming with waaaaaay too many people. They always have something cool, new and shiny to play with. This week, they introduced the US version of the Sony Reader, their implementation of E-Ink in a book reader format. I finally got my hands on one today.

First off, believe the hype. This machine is very sleek, the text is crystal clear and they’ve removed a variety of the the BS restrictions that the Japanese model had(very strict DRM, only used Sony proprietary book formats) and they added a bunch of new features including an RSS reader and the ability to open .doc and .pdf formats. I imagine it will be a little spendy (I recall $300 or $400), but for the first of its kind, not so bad. We’ll see if this thing does better than ebook readers of the past

CES General HDTV PVRs Tivo

Hot Damn! TiVo HD Lives!

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 6, 2006

(Man, I get more and more sweary in my post titles the later that it gets. Maybe its the crappy wifi and crappier Muzak). Gotta check this out tomorrow, but apparently, TiVo is showing off their Series 3 CableCard 1 and 2.0 HD PVR at CES. According to megazone, this unit will have 6 tuners (2 NTSC, 2 ATSC, 2 CableCard). I’m sure they won’t all work simultaneously, but 2 should work. I hope this means I can chuck my Craptastic err… Comcastic box sometime soon. Unfortunately, TiVo has a bit of a reputation of showing off the vapor at CES, so no ship date or price.

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(Via Zatz Not Funny.)

CES Games HDTV Home Entertainment Microsoft Xbox

External HD-DVD for Xbox 360

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 6, 2006

Just to keep it nice and confusing, Microsoft has announced an HD-DVD add-on for the Xbox 360. The announcement talks specifically about movies rather than games, so this unit better be cheaper than standalone units, or MS has a nice Sega CD on their hands.

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CES Portable Entertainment

More Bling

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date January 6, 2006

Normally, I walk through the car tech section with ear plugs and sunglasses to avoid being blinded by the bling, but today, we had to stop to check out the rims stereo system in this car. I suppose with my unhealthy obsession with superheroes and unlimited funds, I might be tempted to make a Stewtopiamobile like this one.

More photos after the jump.