The EchoStar HD DuoDVR SlingLoaded ViP 922 won CNET’s “Best of CES” today, and two of G4’s judging panelists, Attack of the Show host Kevin Pereira and Wired’s Chris Hardwick, both picked EchoStar’s SlingLoaded 922 as their very favorite out of the entire 2009 CES. The EchoStar 922’s unique user interface and remote control were also selected as CES Innovations 2009 Design and Engineering Award honorees prior to the show.
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Yes, that’s me doing my day job. 
Sonic, the owners of CinemaNow, have released a new CinemaNow SDK to make it easier for 3rd party vendors to build CinemaNow support into their devices. Along with this, Sonic is working with a number of vendors to bring CinemaNow content to consumers through new channels. This includes the recently announced deal with LG Electronics, the Nintendo Wii (in Japan), a Widget Channel that is part of Yahoo! Internet@TV, and more. It sounds like Sonic is really looking to breathe new life into CinemaNow, which they just acquired last November. CinemaNow had been on the fast track to being an also-ran to Netflix and Amazon VOD, but it really seems to be picking up steam under the new ownership.
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NETGEAR is launching two new Internet-connected set-top boxes to bring Internet media to the TV. The Internet TV Player, ITV2000, is just larger than a pack of cards but it packs in a ton of features. Without the need for any PC or Mac, all native, it provides access to a slew of Internet content sites:
It streams content from popular sites such as BBC.com, CNN.com, ESPN.com, EuroSport.com, NBC.com, PGATour and TMZ.com, as well as video powerhouses YouTube, Google Videos™, Yahoo Videos™ and MetaCafe™. NETGEAR’s Internet TV Player supports streaming of live TV broadcasts from Internet sites around the world, and premium, paid movies on demand such as CinemaNow.com, in addition to downloaded videos from sites such as BitTorrent®. Its superior VTap™ video search capabilities enable the intelligent search of Internet videos, including targeting video sites by country, topic of interest, person or popular website. Consumers are also able to play video, music, and photos from a local USB flash drive as well as from the NETGEAR ReadyNAS® family of storage solutions.
And it does all this with an MSRP of $199 – that’s sounds like a pretty good price for a box that does all of this, and I fully expect it to be updated with more content access. It is connected to your network via the built-in Ethernet port, or via a USB WiFi adapter. It will be available in early summer.
The other unit is higher end, the Digital Entertainer Elite EVA9150, slated for a February release with a $399 MSRP. For that higher price you get a built-in 500GB drive, easily user upgradable to larger capacities, and support for Blu-ray quality output at 1080p. It works simultaneously with Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs, as well as NAS devices. And it supports a wide array of formats and codecs:
— Video formats: AVI, DivX, Xvid WMV, MOV, M4V, MP4, VOB, MPG, MP1, MP2, MP4, ISO, IFO, MKV, TS and M2TS;
— Audio formats: MP1, MP2, MP3, WMA, WMA-Pro, AAC, FLAC, AIFF, WAV, LPCM, Dolby AC3 5.1 stereo downmix, Dolby AC3 5.1 passthrough, DTS 5.1 passthrough, Dolby TrueHD Downmix, Dolby+ Passthrough and DTS-HD Master Audio passthrough;
— Subtitle formats: SUB, SRT, SMI, SAMI, TXT and DVD Subpicture; and,
— Video codecs: MP1, MP2, MP4, Xvid, VC-1/WMV-9, H.264 and OpenDivX.
That’s quite an extensive list. It has an Ethernet port, but also built-in 802.11n wireless for high-speed WiFi connections. And it is dual-band – operating in both 2.4Ghz and 5GHz bands, which means you can get higher performance in areas saturated with 802.11b/g 2.4GHz signals. It sounds like a fairly impressive unit, I’d like to play with one.
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The SD Card Association has announced the latest generation of SD standards – SDXC, for Secure Digital eXtended Capacity. This takes SD beyond SDHC (High Capacity) to two terabytes (2TB) and read-write speeds of up to 104 megabytes per second, with growth planned to 300 megabytes per second. This is a capacity and interface specification, which is a layer on top of the physical specifications. So we had SD, miniSD, and microSD, and then with SDHC came SDHC, miniSDHC, and microSDHC, so now I fully expect we’ll have SDXC, miniSDXC, and microSDXC. Oh, and of course SDIO is still around for device connections, which will also benefit from SDXC’s higher interface speeds.
Clear as mud?
Short version – the cards will hold more and respond quicker. Of course, you’ll need new devices with SDXC support to take advantage of the new capabilities.
I do have to stop for a moment and just hold one of my SD cards and stare at it and think of something like that holding 2TB – and how my first hard drive was huge and held 40MB, 80MB with Stacker! (Hands up if you remember Stacker.)
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