Here's a new thingy from Viewsonic. Most people know them from their monitors, but they're now into the "wireless media" business, which means moving music, photos and video around your house, via WiFi.
The WMA100 hooks up to your TV and enables you to display photos, play music or, most interestingly, play videos that are stored on a hard drive somewhere (another PC on your home network, for example). The twist here is that Viewsonic appears to have optimized the system for videos.
The use case here is that you have a library of home movies that you have stored on a hard drive, imported from your DV camcorder and you want to show them on a TV. Traditionally you'd have to find the right DV tape, hook up the camcorder to the TV and play. With the WMA100 and imported digital video clips you can just select titles and play.
I'm sure the movie industry isn't too happy about making it this easy, but them's the breaks.
Also, the WMA100 plays not only MP3 files but AAC files as well, like those from iTunes (well, not exactly, you would need to to remove the copy protection from the ITunes purchased content for the music to stream properly. The negative here is that I don;t want to turn on my TV to play music, but it's a nice adder.
Showing photos is an interesting use case - I could use this thing to show my 8000 digital photos that I've been gathering since my 5 year old son was born.
An associated device is the Viewwonic WMG120 - it's a WiFi router like you may already have but it adds a 120 GB hard drive. In this case you store all of your photos, music and video right on this box, instead of a PC. Might even be a good network backup system, but I haven't seen the software yet.
The pricing isn't clear yet but they seem to be moving in the right direction. The home video on demand idea is very interesting....all my home videos are stuck on tapes somewhere!
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