ComTech Review » digital media

Boxee Names First Hardware Partner: It’s D-Link

editor — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:40:00 +0000

There's a big party being held in Brooklyn tonight for Boxee, the Internet video service I wrote about in this story in May. One bit of news is the unveiling of Boxee Beta -- it has to date been available only in a Alpha version -- that has been rebuilt from the ground up.

Engadget has a look at Boxee Beta.

For those unfamiliar, Boxee is an elegant and free media center application for the Mac and Windows that in many ways represents what people imagine when they think of TV moving to the Internet. From within Boxee you can watch Web video in all its various forms: Video podcasts, YouTube clips, downloaded movies, and with some limitations TV shows on from Hulu on your computer.

But it doesn't stop there. It's so good, that I've heard numerous cases of people actually dropping their cable or satellite TV service, in favor of connecting a Mac running Boxee to their favorite TV set. Others have been known to hack their AppleTV devices and install Boxee on them.

That fact in particular suggested opportunity. One of the things founder Avner Ronen told me at the time was that he hoped to get the Boxee service built into consumer hardware, and that he hoped to have some news on this front in time for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which is now less than a month away.

Ronen and his team have delivered, and that is I think the bigger news. I just heard that the first so-called Boxee Box (pictured) will be made by D-Link, the company behind scores of home networking products.

In addition to video, Boxee plays music from your personal music collection, streams music from your favorite Pandora Radio stations, organizes your photos. It's also social: You can share what you're watching with your friends on Twitter and Facebook, and also discover things you might like from your Boxee-using friends.

D-Link says the Boxee Box has already won a "Best of Innovations" award from the Consumer Electronics Association. No price has yet been announced, but they're promising to deliver the product to stores during the second half of 2010. More about the Boxee Box is here.

Appeals Court Nixes DVD Copying, Reverses Kaleidescape

editor — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 22:00:45 +0000

If you think people should be able to make copies of their own DVDs and believe that bad news comes in threes, brace yourself. Yesterday, a federal court in Los Angeles issued a preliminary injunction barring the sale target="_blank" of RealNetwork's RealDVD. Today, the California Court of Appeal added to the pain by overturning (PDF) a trail court's verdict in favor of Kaleidescape's high-end DVD storage systems. Is there a third shoe out there?

The Kaleidescape case, which Real relied on as precedent, has been kicking around the California courts for years. Unlike the suit against Real, which was based on provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Kaleidescape case was a contract dispute. The DVD Content Control Authority alleged that Kaleidescape's devices violated the terms of its DVD CCA license by decrypting DVDs protected by the DVD Content Scramble System so the contents could be stored on, and played from, a hard drive.

Hollywood Wins Key Round Against RealNetworks’ RealDVD

editor — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 03:51:04 +0000

Hollywood extended its nearly unbroken string of legal victories in defense of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Tuesday when U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel issued a preliminary injunction (PDF, courtesy of The New York Times) against the sale of RealNetworks' RealDVD.

RealDVD, a program that gave consumers a simple, and ostensibly legal, way to transfer the content of copy-protected DVDs to hard drives hit the market in September, 2008. Studios and the DVD Content Control Assn. immediately filed suit, claiming that RealDVD violated the "anti-circumvention" provisions of DMCA and quickly won a temporary restraining order against the program's sale.

RealPlayer Adds Format Conversion, Social Networking

editor — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:03:10 +0000

In the early days of media on the Internet, RealPlayer was the indispensable tool for playing postage stamp-sized videos on your PC. Today, the Real Networks software is one media player among many, but the old dog keeps learning new tricks.

The last version of RealPlayer acquired the ability to record streaming video, such as that from YouTube, for offline playback. The newest offering, RealPlayer SP, released today as a public beta, adds the ability to share video through social networking sites such as Facebook, and, more interestingly, to reformat the saved video so that it can be viewed on a wide variety of mobile devices.