Digital Home Thoughts: Got Money to Burn? Check out the Kaleidescape

"The Kaleidescape System organizes your DVD collection while providing nearly instantaneous access to your entire DVD collection from any viewing location in your home. After loading your DVDs onto your Kaleidescape Server, you can access any movie in your collection using an intuitive and entertaining on-screen user interface that provides multiple ways to browse and select movies, play, pause, and resume movies, jump to favorite scenes, and exercise parental control over which movies are available at each viewing zone.

...A Kaleidescape System comprises rack-mountable hardware components, proprietary operating system software, and Kaleidescape’s Movie Guide Service. A basic Kaleidescape System has one Server (with five disk cartridges for storing up to 160 movies), one Movie Player, and one DVD Reader. Additional cartridges can be added to the Server, up to a total of 12, which is sufficient to store 440 movies....The Kaleidescape System has been designed for the anticipated widespread availability of HD content. The massive capacity of the Server is ideal for storing large HD movies and the Movie Player hardware is designed to support both 720p and 1080i video output.

Pricing will depend on the amount of movie storage as well as the number of viewing zones. A base Kaleidescape System lists for $27,000 and includes a Kaleidescape Server with sufficient storage for 160 DVD movies, a Movie Player for playback in a single zone, and a DVD Reader for importing DVDs. The storage capacity can be easily expanded to over 400 movies for less than $6,000 and an unlimited number of Movie Players can be added for $3995 per zone. The Kaleidescape System has a 36-month warranty on the hardware and lifetime support on the software and Movie Guide Service."

The words "Holy DVR Batman!" don't begin to describe this beast. 8O The price is outrageous, but this isn't for your average consumer - just like Samsung is targetting their 60" plasma TVs at the billionaire market, this device is targetted at rich people who like their toys. Conceptually, this is very slick though, and I can see it trickling downstream to the rest of the world. I wonder how the movie studios feel about this though? I bet there's massive DRM on the movies that are ripped...