If the number of new product releases is a sign of market potential, then the digital media player market is primed to explode. It’s actually becoming difficult to keep track of all the new product releases and their differentiating features, especially since most of the players offer little more than minor variations to the “digital content on your TV” theme. While this is the future of TV, a unified UI by which traditional, online, and personal digital media can find seamless integration to the TV, as opposed to the computer screen, hasn’t yet been achieved.
But unwilling to be left out of this explosive market, Seagate today announced the release of its FreeAgent Theater+ HD media player. The 1080p HDMI device expectantly supports Dolby Digital and DTS audio, has two additional USB ports for storage expansion, can connect to a home network via its in-built Ethernet port, and is compatible with all the standard photo, video, and audio codecs and file types, including h.264. The user interface appears clean and intuitive, resembling the familiar folder structure of PC’s and traditional DVD menus.
The cool feature of the FreeAgent Theater+ is its hard drive dock. Anyone who owns a Seagate FreeAgent Go portable hard drive and docking station can load up their PC based media onto the hard drive manually or with Seagate’s included syncing software, dock the hard drive to the FreeAgent Theater+, and instantly access those media files via the device’s interface. The large FreeAgent Go capacities coupled with their relatively low cost per Gigabyte affords users of the FreeAgent Theater+ the opportunity to own multiple drives holding their digital media collections. Because of this, Seagate’s hard drive docking concept could potentially solve the data storage and backup problem incurred by the increased use of high capacity camcorders. Look for these having a $150 MSRP without any FreeAgent Go storage.
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