Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"The second coming of Boxee is here. Though D-Link was first to take the popular home theater PC interface and roll it into a standalone device with the Boxee Box, Iomega will take it own shot at the ultimate media streamer in February with Iomega TV. Despite sharing the same basic software, Iomega TV differentiates itself from D-Link's Boxee Box with a number of design changes designed to make it an up-market offering. Number one: It's the Celine Dion to D-Link's Lady Gaga. Iomega will ditch the love-it-or-leave-it styling of the Boxee Box in favor of a standard black-box design that blend in a little more in most staid home theater setups."

It's been a long time since I was impressed by anything that Iomega has done - I'm frankly baffled as to how/why they're still in business - but this looks like it might be a winner for them. If offers the same Boxee software experience as the D-Link product for an MSRP of $229.99 (no hard drive); $299.99 gets you a 1 TB internal hard drive, while $349.99 gets you 2 TB. I personally don't have the need for local storage on my Boxee Box, but for some people, this might be exactly what they've been waiting for.

"If you like the streaming capabilities of Sony Blu-ray players, you’ll love the new SMP-N100 Network Media Player. This SMP-N100 Netbox has everything the Sony BDP-S570 has, minus the Blu-ray drive and plus the support of additional video formats including DivX and MKV. And the suggested retail price is only $129, meaning the street price may eventually come in around the $100 mark. That puts the product into contention with other standalone media streamers like those from Roku, Popbox and Western Digital."

Pretty compelling. More available content and features than the Roku box at a comparable price and from a brand more recognizable to Joe Consumer. If they can market this well so people can understand what it does, they could sell a lot of these, especially for secondary TV's where people might not necessarily want/need a full sized Blu-ray player.

"Yes, the world needs another high-definition media streamer like it needs a shot in the foot, but never let it be said we passed up the chance to try a promising product simply because the competition was good. We're talking about the Uebo M200 --a never-before-seen box from storage company UIT -- whose claim to fame is a $130 price for everything-but-the-kitchen-sink media center functionality. Out of the box it's your standard streamer, playing loads of media formats from memory cards, attached storage and thumbdrives, plus ShoutCast internet radio, RSS feeds and UPnP shares from your PC, but also the usual suspects Hulu, Netflix, CBS and more via PlayOn media server."

There are a large number of media streamers out there if you're in the market for one, PopCorn Hour, Boxee, Buffalo Linktheatre to name a few. It's very difficult sometimes to differentiate between each product and what they can do, with the usability of the GUI interface being one of the deciding factors along with the codecs that they can handle. Unfortunately this new product from Uebo doesn't seem to have impressed Engadget on the GUI front, and this really is one of the things companies need to focus on. It's all very well having a product that can play every codec on the planet, but if the interface is clunky and unusable, people just won't buy it.