Convergence is such a loaded word. Often people assume it means that your TV is networked to your TiVo which plays MP3s off your PC. While that vision is well and good (and my 4 year old assumes everyone lives that way), most people adopt point solutions that meet their needs at much lower price points. It’s not just home theater; even in the PC world, this is true. Sneakernet is a prime example: rather than wire up their homes to share files, many people burn a CD or DVD, or put the files on a USB keychain drive and then walk the files over – thus using their sneakers – to the other PC.
SanDisk does a great job of enabling this slightly lower tech, less featured, mainstream-useful form of convergence. Disclaimer: I think SanDisk is a great company for a lot of reasons, not least of all because they send me basically everything they make, sometimes without my having to even ask for it. One of those products showed up the other day, their latest iteration of their Photo Viewer. For $30 – 50, the first version of this product was cheap, ugly, and performed as advertised: plug the unit into your TV, place the memory card from your digital camera into the unit, and your pictures appear on your TV. Simple, useful functionality included a remote control, the ability to rotate the picture, and basic slideshows.
Today’s version is a sleek gray/silver box, about the size of a thick checkbook. Aesthetically, it perfectly matches every gray/silver digital TV on the market. It still sells for under $50. It still has composite video outputs (limiting it to 480i resolution), but the user interface is dramatically better, it now supports xD memory (used in Fuji and Konica-Minolta cameras), it plays back the MPEG movies digital cameras take, and it plays back MP3 files and can use them as background music for slideshows. In a naked push to increase memory card sales (the largest part of SanDisk’s product portfolio), it also has an additional memory card slot in back to allow you to move pictures off your digital camera’s memory and onto the secondary memory. This lets you create a master slide show always available for viewing on your TV, even when the other memory cards are back in their cameras. I actually found this feature quite useful, and could envision this as a perfect “grandma gift” – whenever you come over, you upload the latest pictures to the rear memory card, leaving the memories behind. [audience: awwwwwww.]
At the very high end of the market, Roku has a Digital Media Player that displays high resolution photos from memory cards or off a networked PC. It’s beautiful, and, Roku, if you’re reading this, I want one. But it costs $299, and the SanDisk product is likely “good enough” for most people. Roku should watch out, too – if SanDisk’s next version supports high resolution output, Roku will be limited to the market segment that cares about home theater networking.
-avi
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