iboum.com : Future Entertainment Technology : Digital Media Content and Media Players

On-Demand Content
This page is about the most important part of a Media Player, the content you end up viewing on it. Content is the area which is seeing some of the biggest changes for Media Players in 2010/11.

UPnP / DLNA
The first thing to note is that most Media Players are capable of a networking service called 'UPnP' or 'DLNA'. using these services you can use the Media Player as a 'media extender' and access most on-demand services available for PCs, providing a PC is turned on and connected to the Media Player. Whilst this is a workable solution, it is far from ideal. The setup is often complicated and by having the PC turned on you are negating some of the main benefits of the Media Player in reduced power usage and simplicity.

Standalone On-Demand Content
Up until recently Media Players have been primarily for playing the widest variety possible of stored media files, from attached physical storage or from local networked storage. The origin of that content varies but could be home movie footage, photos, ripped copies of DVDs or Blu-Ray discs, or content downloaded from the internet (note that we do not condone the use of any copyrighted content).

Now in late 2010 we are starting to see Media Players whose primary purpose is to provide access to paid internet streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon On-Demand. We have long argued that paid streaming services are the future of home entertainment. Ideally you would have (paid) streaming access to every piece of media ever made through one set-top-box. This is easily technically feasible but sadly not looking likely anytime soon.

If you were able to access any movie / TV show you wanted for instant paid streaming, would you go to trouble of downloading anything again, let alone buying a fiddly plastic disc first conceived in 1982?

Unfortunately the problem that has arisen is that the new players with good paid streaming capability have very poor general format support, so they will probably not play your existing collection of movies, will not allow you to play your ripped DVD collection, and will not allow you to view home movies from your camcorder or cameraphone.

We consider this very short sighted and point the finger of blame squarely at the content providers (i.e. movie studios, TV companies). Recent promising players such as Popbox have been deprived of decent paid streaming content because of their ability to play a wide variety of local content. Even very mainstream products like Apple TV mk2 have a very limited selection of paid streaming content because of reluctance from content providers.

The situation is reminiscent of the music industry in the early 2000s where MP3 and iTunes were destroying the sales of music CDs, whilst the music companies steadfastly refused to abandon the CD relic and distribute content digitally. The result was that music is widely available for download and seen as a free commodity.

It seems lessons have not been learnt! We have always passionately advocated the case for a device that can both play all legacy media files and provide access to a wide variety of paid streaming content. We believe that if such a device were released people would largely abandon illegal downloading for the convenience of paid content streaming.

It is not as if consumers don't have a choice. The situation with music is being repeated with video. If history should have told the media industry anything it should be that once the genie is out there's no stopping him. Well, the Genie has been out for a while. Services like Netflix should be available in every Media Player and TV worldwide to prevent illegal content proliferating. Most people are willing to pay a fair price if given the choice.

Anyway, what follows is a table showing various Media Players graded according to paid streaming vs. format support. With very little crossover at the moment, you pays your money you makes your choice.!

	Player Name	Notes
Pure streamer	Roku	Pure streamer for Netflix, Amazon OD, MLB (US only)
Mostly streamer	Apple TV (mk2)	Stream Netflix, Amazon OD, FOX (US only) whilst also allowing networked iTunes content to be played.
Hybrid	WDTV Live Plus, Seagate GoFlex TV, Viewsonic VMP75, Sony SMP-N100, Boxee Box	Stream primarily Netflix (US only) and also act as decent local/networked Media Players
Multi-format Media Player	Dune, Popcorn Hour, Egreat, ACRyan	Pure Media Players, play wide variety of content but no paid streaming

Page last updated: 08-Apr-11

Comments