Category: Gadgets

The new owners of ReplayTV have decided to avoid the roth, and the lawyers, of the US TV broadcasters by removing two of the functions that the broadcasters had the greats expection to — the automatic skipping of adverts and the ability to send a recorded show to another ReplayTV-equiped household — from their soon to be released 5500 series. Pricing hasn’t been announced.

There’s been a lot of speculation over the price that Microsoft will charge for the Xbox Live service after it’s all inclusive trial price comes to an end. They’ve now announced it at just short of $50/year or just short of $6/month. Whether the offering is strong enough to demand that kind of money isn’t obvious, but what is clear is that it will face stiff competition from the Sony’s zero cost service.

VIA and Niveus have announced a digital lifestyle product, the Niveus Media ONEbox. The 1GHz machine runs Windows XP and is based on VIA mainboard and chippery, providing the functionality you would have imagined,

• Connects to your TV and HiFi
• PVR functions – record and playback TV
• Play DVD’s
• Play/rip CD’s & MP3’s
• Display digital photo’s
• Pull content from other machines on your network
• Interfaces for Ethernet, Firewire, USB, serial and parallel ports
• Controllable via a remote control

Niveus Media have developed their own software, ONEbox Media Center, to control all functions and have integrated the TitanTV‘s Electronic Program Guide (EPG), which will mean it will only cover US TV programming.

It has a reasonable, non-PC looking case but doesn’t appear to have native support for WiFi and, as its single PCI slot is taken up with an ATI All-In-Wonder VE TV tuner card, it doesn’t look can unless it’s via USB. The expected price is $999 US and they plan to ship it in June 2003.

There is a growing number of these lounge-ready Media Hub/Digital Lifestyles devices appearing, which is further testament to realisation of media/computer convergence.

It’s been a little over a month since Microsoft launched Xbox Live in Europe (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom) and they have now reached 50,000 units.

The North America service was launched in November 2002 and they make up the vast majority of the current 350,000 Global users, who are playing more than three million game sessions per week. Amazingly the US users are spending an average of 2.5 hours per day Live gaming with the peak gaming times being during television prime time.

There are currently 11 Xbox Live-compatible games and 2003 will see the launch of more than 50 Xbox Live-enabled games, but it isn’t clear if the games will be including online playing or just the less interesting, but popular, content download. A while back “MechAssault“, from Microsoft Game Studios, had more than 172,000 downloads during the first week of availability — more than half of the registered users.

The new Xbox Live games for release over the next two months are as follows:-May 2003

• Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Lucas Arts) – Multiplayer and Downloadable Content
• Godzilla (Infogrames) – Downloadable Content
• MotoGP 2 (THQ) – Multiplayer
• Phantasy Star Online (Sega) – Multiplayer
• Burnout 2 (Acclaim) – Online Scoreboards
• Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Activision) – Multiplayer and Downloadable Content

June 2003

• Midtown Madness (Microsoft Games Studios) – Multiplayer and Downloadable Content
• Midnight Club 2 (Take2 Interactive/Rockstar) – Multiplayer
• Brute Force (Microsoft Games Studios) – Downloadable Content
  

D&M Holdings Inc. who are Denon and Marantz have been successful in their purchase of both the ReplayTV and Rio business units from SonicBlue.

Sony started selling the first blue-laser DVD recorder, the BDZ-S77, in Japan on 10 April at a cost of ¥450,000 ($3,760/£2,380).

Conforming to the Blu-ray standard, it’s capable of recording two hours of high-definition video at maximum quality, or four hours of standard-definition digital broadcasting or up to 16 hours of lower quality analog terrestrial, all in MPEG-2 format.

By using a blue laser, which has a shorter wavelength than the current red laser standard, it stores information more densely giving at least 23Gb on each disk (¥3,500/$30/£18), around five times the capacity of a standard DVD.

As ever, there are going to be competing standards for HD DVD recordings, three others this time, but Sony is the first to release a product.

Sony is planning to release an upgraded version of the PlayStation2 in Japan on 15 May, increasing its DVD playback capability.

A while back Sony released a DVD recorder that writes both of the major competing formats, DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW. Interestingly, the new PS2 will also support both of these, as well as the picture-enhancing “progressive scan” playback and a built-in IR port for the remote control.

Combine these with the 75% reduction in fan noise and it looks like it’s becoming a better entertainment centre.

Given the PS2 now has a broadband adaptor, this could/should open up the market for enhanced DVD’s that provide additional content depth via the Internet.

There’s a software upgrade for TiVo Series2 owners now available. The $99 Home Media Option gives the owner the ability to browser their photos, listen to their MP3’s, remote schedule recordings and view the recordings in many rooms around the house if they have a home network.

There is further news on the previous story of Sonicblue’s Chapter 11 troubles. They now plan to auction off the ReplayTV and Rio business units, after negotiations with D&M Holdings didn’t reach mutually agreeable terms.

A large part of Sonicblue’s troubles were down to it having to spend $3m a month on legal fees.

The question that is always raised, when one or more TiVo owners are gathered together is — why doesn’t everyone have one? I know that I couldn’t live without mine. In fact I don’t watch live TV, unless there happens to be a war on. In-Stat/MDR latest report reveals that 83% of their respondents were either “Extremely satisfied” or “Very satisfied” with their PVR.

After a very slow uptake, annual shipments of units have finally reached 1m Worldwide and In-Stat predicted this will rise to 11m by 2005 as manufacturers include PVR function in their other products, as was signalled by Panasonic when they shipped the PV-SS2710, a 27″ TV with build-in PVR back in Feb.

This, tragically coming the business day after ReplayTV’s SonicBlue filing for Chapter 11, shows the innovators don’t always reap the rewards.