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VIRTUALISATION Can SanDisk TakeTV to the next level in TV download wars?
VIRTUALISATION Can SanDisk TakeTV to the next level in TV download wars? | Can SanDisk TakeTV to the next level in TV download wars? |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Tuesday, 23 October 2007 | |
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They’ve been able to hold off competitors including Creative, Sony, Samsung, Microsoft’s Zune, Archos and others thanks to a range of digital media players from the basic to the advanced. Some high-end models have a familiar sounding feature: a circular navigation wheels, although controlled by physical movement, as opposed to the touch sensitivity of Apple’s iPod click wheels. Another model has wireless features, while others compete with the iPod Nano and the Shuffle in various ways. SanDisk are also one of the world’s major manufacturers of flash memory, letting them source flash memory for their own players at the best prices. Now SanDisk’s newest model is the Sansa TakeTV , a 4GB or 8GB USB flash drive (at US $100 and $150 respectively) that plugs into your PC or Mac for drag and drop capability of MPEG4, DiVX or XviD video files, and then plugs into an adapter that connects to almost any TV through an S-Video or composite video cable and standard left and right RCA audio sockets to play video in standard definition – no doubt high definition models will come in the future. When plugged into a TV, a Windows Media Center style interface appears on screen, letting you navigate through your collection of TV shows and movies stored on your TakeTV unit, all controlled by the innovative remote control unit clips onto the TakeTV’s USB port to protect it when not in use, while being a remote control unit the rest of the time, with the concept being Apple TV-like in its simplicity while being available to consumers at a much lower cost, and in a much more portable form factor. The video can come from your own collection, or from SanDisk’s new Fanfare video download service which has just launched with the beta tag., letting you buy TV shows and movies from US $1.99 each, or downloading free editions of TV shows embedded with TV commercials making them free to users to download and watch. It’s SanDisk’s answer to iTunes for video downloads to a USB device that plugs into almost any TV, making the transport and download of TV shows and movies, and then watching them with friends, a very simple – and legal process. Although the service will ultimately work with a range of digital media players and mobile phones beyond SanDisk’s own media player models, the service initially only works with the SanDisk Sansa TakeTV plugged into the PC’s USB drive. SanDisk ambitiously says that “Fanfare with Sansa TakeTV creates an exceptional, end-to-end entertainment system enabling viewers to time-shift and place-shift their favorite shows by downloading them from their PC to watch them on nearly any TV, at any time”. As we said, that's very ambitious. What are SanDisk's chances of successfully making it happen against a plethora of competitors beyond Apple and iTunes? Please read onto page 2 for the conclusion... |
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