Digital video player news - WD TV Live Hub. Roku and Netflix, VUDU and the Boxee Box

Last week was a busy week in the digital video player market, with product introductions or extensions made from Western Digital, Roku and NETGEAR, and the Boxee Box and VUDU.

• Western Digital introduced the WD TV® Live Hub™ media center a 1080p media player with a 1 terabyte (TB) built-in network hard drive that gives users the freedom to play all their personal media on any screen in the home. The WD TV Live Hub media center brings new experiences to the WD TV family, including instantly renting or purchasing the newest releases through the Blockbuster On Demand® service, the same day as DVD/Blu-ray release, as well as interacting with personal Facebook® communities.
• Roku announced that is was licensing its Streaming Media Player Platform, and further announced NETGEAR as its first OEM Partner. The NETGEAR Roku Player - priced at $89.99 - will provide access to more than 100,000 movies and TV shows, live sporting events, music, online content from providers such as Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, Vimeo, Pandora, MP3tunes, SmugMug, Flickr, MLB.TV ,and UFC.
• VUDU will be available via Boxee, including the Boxee Box. VUDU will be available as a Boxee App on Windows and Mac computers, as well as the Boxee Box by D-Link this November
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

WD TV Live - Best Selling Networked Digital Video Player

I had an interesting call with Western Digital yesterday regarding their WD TV Live Plus product, one that we categorize as a Networked Digital Video Player. They indicate that recent sales numbers actually have them leading this category for the U.S. market. They note that they're even beating the vaunted Roku Digital Video Player.

After years of hand-wringing about how (or if) digital media adapters would sell (which they really didn't until it was determined that streamed video was the one type of content that would spur their sales), Western Digital's role in consumer storage gives them an excellent brand at which to approach this market. If you look at the consumer segments that demonstrate the need for a stand-alone digital video player - lots of current consumption of online video, willingness to condider additional equipment to accomodate video streaming to the television, etc. - current network-attached storage users are a great fit. Our own data (see chart) shows just how much more NAS owners are interacting with online video.


In other connected TV news, Accedo Broadband has announced that it is in the TV apps business. Although the company has a legacy of developing gaming applications, it has expaded to include video and other digital media. They will be showing this at the upcoming IBC in Amsterdam.

Western Digital Introduces the WD Live Media Player

WD's digital media players have gone from "Sneakernet" (the WD TV product) to home network-connected with the introduction of the WD Live Media Player today. The product features network capability and Full-HD 1080p resolution.

The WD TV Live media player connects directly to a users' HD TV and plays almost any file stored on a connected USB drive such as My Passport™ portable drive. The WD TV Live media player features powerful media processing, which enables playback in Full-HD 1080p resolution. WD TV Live media player also will play movies and photos stored on other popular USB devices such as digital camcorders and digital cameras.

Western Digital expands the capacity of the My DVR Expander product

Western Digital announced today that its My DVR Expander™ is now available with 1 TB capacity. TiVo Verified™ compatible with TiVo Series3™ and TiVo HD DVRs, the new My DVR Expander is capable of storing up to 140 hours of high-definition (HD) television programming based on 1 TB of hard drive storage.

The ability to expand DVR storage with an attached external drive was something that we explored in both domestic and international consumer studies last year - TV 2.0: The Consumer Perspective and Entertainment 2.0 in Europe. We found fairly high demand for this kind of solution, particularly among consumers in the U.S., the U.K., France, and Italy.