Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"This is pretty amazing news! The Mac XBMC spin-off, Plex, has inked a deal with LG to bring their platform to NetCast enabled HDTVs and Blu-ray players in 2011. The company cites Plex's media server capabilities, ability to aggregate content from multiple sources (online and locally), and its drop dead simple and attractive UI as the main reason for Plex's inclusion into the NetCast offering. However, the way Plex will work on these TVs, according to the Plex Blog, is a cloud-based Plex App will be included in NetCast for accessing online content and services, which Plex is known for, and then have the ability to pull in additional content from "a Plex Media Server running anywhere in the house" (I'm guessing the app will be compatible with other UPnP media servers as well). I've got to be thinking this news must have the folks at Boxee and Apple (among others) spinning for the reason they both have expressed intentions of getting on the TV itself instead of assisting the TV with an adapter / media streamer device. FYI, Plex Media Server will be coming to other OSes, besides Mac OS X, in the near future (the LG rep in the demo below says a Windows version of Plex Media Server should be out by November)."

LG has announced a deal with Plex that will see the XMBC like media server included in future netcast enabled LG HDTV's. Integrated media servers and TV's are something I expect to see more and more of now as manufacturers start to move towards a more centralised hub for entertainment. Whether that is something that we want as customers remains to be seen, but I can certainly see the logic for doing so.

"For years, industry pundits have claimed that Cablecard is dead. Cablecard, which enables consumers to get local and premium HD cable television programming directly into TV's and Media Center PC's via a digital cable tuner. It seemed poised to unlock consumers from the underpowered, much maligned cable boxes many rent from their cable provider and often loathe today. Yet the reality is there are only 443k 3rd party Cablecard devices in service (4 of those in my own house) and it's clear the situation is going to get worse before it gets better."

With two young boys in the house the inability to use video on demand was always a show stopper for me, but I hope that the new Tru2way cards get rolled out in a big way. Competition would do wonders to improve the user experience, but for now the only viable alternative seems to be Tivo. Unfortunately, the cost of two Cablecards and the Tivo monthly fee makes the per TV price twice as much, and that doesn't even include the price of the hardware. It would be wonderful to be able to stroll into the local Best Buy and have as many choices for set top boxes as there are for cellphones, wireless routers, cameras, and just about every other technology that is subject to some competition.

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"With TwonkyMedia manager, you can share your media on compatible devices throughout your home. Want to send a photo slideshow to your digital photo frame? No problem. Watch your favorite videos on the TV? Easy. Play music in every room in your house? TwonkyMedia manager makes all this possible."

PacketVideo has updated their TwonkyMedia Manager to version 1.1. TwonkyMedia Manager stems from the TwonkyVision Server, but unlike Server, it is a commercial program for Windows for $39.95. TwonkyMedia Manager is a UPnP media server that also works with the DLNA standard. It collects all your media on your computer and puts it into a pretty little library which you can manage, access and stream from all over your home. It can also act as a portal to YouTube, Flickr and other media sites. The recent update includes some performance and interface improvements along with an expanded Internet radio list and added support for several online services. There are several competitors with a lot of the similar features as TwonkyMedia Manager, so it is nice to see PacketVideo updating its software and not rest on its laurels.