January 14, 2008

Media Server Overkill: Introducing the Envive TheaterStation

We thought we had seen it all with the onslaught of media devices shown off at CES this year, but we just came across an article about the Envive TheaterStation and we still can not figure out who in the hell this product is aimed at. We understand that the future of movie rentals will be via a download service to authorized hardware that you will own. We actually love this idea as it frees the consumer from having to deal with the media and most of the technology that goes along with setting up a home media streaming solution. There are many different ways to go about providing customers with this 'on demand' type of service. You could stream the movie to the box from a central location, but this would rely on the end user having a fast Internet connection. You could have them download the entire movie in advance and only make it good for 2 days from when they started watching it. The list could go on, actually if I could come up with like 3 more I should probably be working for a different company :). Anyway, back to the point. Envive thinks they have come up with a great product for this second market and to be honest the details that have been released don't make much sense to us.

Their product involves a fancy carousel style movie viewer, similar to Cover Flow, and a big hard drive to store movies on. While this all sounds normal there is a strange piece that just doesn't add up. The price for their basic system is $2,495.99!! We aren't sure what they could be possible offering in this device to warrant that kind of price tag. From what we could tell from the press release you are just storing movies on the internal hard drive for playback later. While we applaud them for trying to make the process of viewing movies a more seamless process for the end user,they have totally missed the mark if they think they will see any sort of mass adoption of this device. We will try and find out more information about what this is all about and if we come up with anything we will let you know.

via ehomeupgrade

Read More in: CES 2008 | Video Streaming