New Apple TV: $99, Netflix streaming, 99-cent TV rentals | Crave. After a flurry of last-minute rumors , Apple announced its completely revamped Apple TV at its keynote Wednesday, featuring a much smaller design, 99-cent TV rentals from ABC and Fox, and Netflix streaming capabilities. The new Apple TV will come out in late September and will cost $99, which is a large decrease from the current $230 price of the old Apple TV.
The new design is about a quarter the size of the original Apple TV, and its connectivity has been stripped to just five ports: HDMI, optical digital audio output, USB, Ethernet, and power. There's also built-in Wi-Fi, so you won't need to drag an Ethernet cord into the living room. Unlike the old model, the new Apple TV doesn't have onboard storage, instead it streams all content either directing from the Internet or other devices on your home network. The 99-cent TV rentals, even for HD content, from Disney and Fox represent a significant break from current online TV streaming prices. Stream Movies & TV Online, Watch Online Movies, Netflix Ready Device.
EchoStar announces Sling Media acquisition -- Sling totally "psyched" Roku Digital Video Player | Watch Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand and MLB.TV on Roku Player. Boxee - Movies, TV Shows and Video from the Internet on your TV. The Sofa Wars - Plenty to Watch Online, but Viewers Prefer to Pay for Cable. Veebeam unveils PC-to-TV offering | Crave. If there's been an underlying theme to consumer electronics in the past year, it's been this: audiences are looking for easier ways to view Web video on their big-screen TVs.
That's really the promise of widget- and app-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, game consoles, and Roku boxes, as well as the coming wave of specialized products such as Boxee, Apple TV, and Google TV. And it's exactly the market for which newcomer Veebeam is aiming as well. Veebeam can most accurately be described as a PC-to-TV video streamer. Plug the included USB dongle into your laptop, and whatever's on your computer screen will be streamed wirelessly to the Veebeam box that's connected to your TV--without the need for any convoluted wireless networking setup.
We've seen this sort of "screen scraping" or "screen projecting" products before--the Slingcatcher and the come to mind. Like those models mentioned above, the Veebeam's primary advantage is that it can stream anything you can view on your PC screen. Netgear tries to kill off local storage with its networked media servers (video)
Consumers are collecting a lot of media these days. And that’s fueling the need for media servers, which back your data up to a network storage device and let you access it from just about anywhere. Among the companies leading the charge for these media servers is Netgear, which tonight launched the latest models of its ReadyNAS Ultra media storage servers. Patrick Lo, chief executive of San Jose, Calif. -based Netgear (pictured above), said network-attached storage (NAS) devices that were once used only in data centers are now making their way into small businesses and even homes. The benefits of these network devices — dubbed the digital brain for the connected home — are so plentiful that they might kill off local storage, Netgear contends. That contention — that we might not need stand-alone hard drives on our computers — is a little far-fetched for now.
Lo estimates that the market today is about $500 million in sales.