IKEA's new home entertainment system (including TV)

 

The biggest problem with integrating today's newest TVs into your home is finding a competent home theater installer (or having enough DIY knowhow) to properly mount your TV, hide your components, and then hide the wires, which is no small task. 

IKEA, probably tired of seeing their clean lined modern home theater units and stands covered in wires set out to solve the problem of mounting, hiding, and even getting things down to a single remote controller. They're calling this system UPPLEVA.

IKEA is going to start selling TVs with integrated home theater setups including a 1080p LED TV, DivX playback, Blu-ray/DVD/CD player, WiFi, as well as speakers including a wireless subwoofer. It looks pretty good and will solve a lot of problems for a large audience. I look forward to seeing what the pricing is like and what the capabilities are.

April 17, 2012 by Matt Haughey in News, Television | permalink | Comments (0)

Promise.tv - records all content in a 7-day window

An interesting project out of the UK: Promise.tv. It has the ability to record all Freeview (British TV) streams including TV and radio (about 60 channels total) in a one-week buffer, allowing you to watch anything broadcast in the past seven days. No more season passes, no more suggested recordings, instead you get the ability to see anything at all on any channel recorded.

It's pretty crazy that this kind of heavy multistream recording is possible now in a single small box.

(via BoingBoing, who is offering a 50% off price when ordering direct)

February 20, 2012 by Matt Haughey in News | permalink | Comments (0)

DirecTiVo now nationwide

Looks like the previously announced official TiVo unit for DirecTV that launched in December is now nationwide in the US. I live outside of their launch cities but noticed I can now sign up for new service and receive a free TiVo unit for it.

(I just may sign up and have DirecTV alongside my ailing fiber service from Frontier Communications, who has almost completely phased out TV service)

February 20, 2012 by Matt Haughey in DirecTV, TiVo | permalink | Comments (2)

TiVo's Margret Schmidt tweets screenshots of updates for Premiere units

Head of TiVo's design group Margret Schmidt (interview from a few years ago here) has been tweeting teaser screenshots of a new TiVo release. It sounds like it is destined only for the new Premiere units and will slowly be deployed over the following few weeks (she also mentioned you can email her to get on the early list). Here are some shots she has shared:

Multi-room streaming
Still offers 4 tuner recording
New (HD) TiVo central
New Search screens (HD)
New info banner during playback
New info banner expanded
New smaller on-screen guide option
New expanded guide layout
New expanded guide selections

These are likely all teasers of what's to come from TiVo at CES next week. They'e also announced a new Android TiVo app.

January 6, 2012 by Matt Haughey | permalink | Comments (6)

GoogleTV coming to most TVs?

Last month there was news that made some waves when Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated that in about six months, most TVs would include GoogleTV. Most tech pundits thought it was a bit silly and a bit too early to make such a claim but with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) coming to Las Vegas next week, the GoogleTV blog has listed a bunch of announcements coming soon from Sony, Vizio, Samsung, LG, Marvell, and MediaTek.

I generally like my GoogleTV device, though I don't use it much beyond playing DVDs and occasionally watching some online video (it is the only device I've found that can reliably play flash video from any site on my TV), so I never really saw a standalone box becoming a big seller in the marketplace. If Google could get GoogleTV baked into TVs in lieu of each TV manufacturer having to custom program their own online UI (I have a Samsung TV with all the Samsung apps and they are harder to use than any of my set top box devices attached to it) I think this can be a big hit with customers buying new TVs and casually starting to use technology such as GoogleTV. 

January 6, 2012 by Matt Haughey in News | permalink | Comments (0)

TiVo for DirecTV finally (sort of) launches!

After hinting at rekindling the DirecTV-TiVo relationship for the last 5+ years, there is finally a new DirecTiVo out. It is only available in large cities at the moment (Chicago, Denver, LA, NYC, Philly, Phoenix, Sacramento, SF, Seattle, DC) but it's definitely good news to anyone that has ever used the older models in the early 2000s. I myself thoroughly enjoyed the DirecTiVo I had from 2002-2005, and I only gave it up when there wasn't a viable HD option for DirecTV.

There isn't a ton of specs available yet, but if this was available where I live, I would seriously consider moving to it, especially as my own fiber optic cable provider has strongly hinted that they are canceling TV service in the next year or so. Here's hoping they spread it to more markets soon.

December 8, 2011 by Matt Haughey in DirecTV, News, TiVo | permalink | Comments (4)

Mark Suster on the Future of TV

Mark Suster is an investor in new net-based TV startups and in this 10 minute talk he breaks down ten reasons why Internet TV is ready to disrupt the industry. His full list of points and explanations is available on his blog, and in a presentation format.

It's a great bunch of ideas that take note of the weird transition period we are currently in. When I was giving away my old TiVo, I had trouble finding any close friends with a HD cable package that could even use the device. Almost everyone I know is either cutting cable completely for internet video, or cutting way back on their cable plans to the absolute bare minimums. My friends tend to be technology canaries in the coal mine, but the writing is on the wall, and in the next few years we'll definitely see a mainstream switch to online video (and cancelations of cable TV plans).

November 17, 2011 by Matt Haughey in News, Op-Ed | permalink | Comments (0)

Boxee announces Live TV attachment

Boxee, the creators of the beloved Boxee Box announced an interesting new product: Live TV, a $100 attachment that can connect HD over the air TV antennas and unencrypted cable to your Boxee Box. In their blog post they include a FAQ with all the common questions answered.

This is a fascinating product, clearly aimed at helping people cut the cord on their cable bill, while letting them not miss live TV events that relying on downloaded/streaming content lacks. This is clearly a stopgap measure for the weird time we live in right now where you either have to pay $100+ dollars each month for 500+ channels or you skip it entirely and just download/stream what you like and miss out on major news, sports, and events on the main networks. (via Uncrate)

November 17, 2011 by Matt Haughey in Products | permalink | Comments (5)

New release of GoogleTV is out: now with apps

via www.flickr.com

GoogleTV owners (all 6 of you!), the long-awaited update to GoogleTV was finally released this week, and my Sony player picked it up on Thursday.

One of the big features is an app store, though the entire store on day one is only a couple dozen random apps. It's a cart-and-horse problem, but now that it's out there, it will be interesting to see what types of apps are created and released specifically for the GoogleTV in the future.

November 7, 2011 by Matt Haughey in News | permalink | Comments (0)

No live TV streams: Here’s why?

Over the years, there have been fierce bat­tle between the con­tent play­ers and con­tent car­ri­ers over such fees, lead­ing, for exam­ple, to TV sta­tions not being avail­able on cer­tain cable chan­nels as pres­sur­ing tac­tics dur­ing nego­ti­a­tions. Part of the rea­son is that some of the con­tent play­ers are now also owned by con­tent car­ri­ers, lead­ing to sit­u­a­tions where large con­glom­er­ates that own both car­ri­ers and cre­ators look to get an advan­tage by forc­ing higher trans­mis­sion fees on their competitors.

via www.tnl.net

A good essay on some reasons why streaming live TV isn't even offered these days, and why it may be a long time coming.

November 7, 2011 by Matt Haughey in Op-Ed | permalink | Comments (0)

« Archives