Western Digital has just updated their line of media players with the WD TV Live Hub that pretty much ties a lot of different devices into this one box. Like every other WD TV device, it’s a full HD media center for playing movies, music and photos, and it’s a network drive with 1TB of storage space for serving up media to either an HDTV.
If you’ve got five grand to burn and a blank wall in your living room that can fit a big screen, here’s something you might like: Bose’s VideoWave system includes a 46-inch 1080p HDTV, 16 speakers with surround sound processing, HDMI, USB, a separate console for plugging your set-tops into without cluttering the space around the TV itself, a universal remote so your coffee table doesn’t get filled up with all your set top remotes, and an iPod dock for playing porting media from your iPhone or iPod to the TV or speakers.
Okay, we get it. With all the new electronics that stretch from smartphones, handheld consoles, and ebook readers to laptops, desktops and tablets, we’re all guilty of ignoring the good ‘ol boob tube these days. We know we have. (Although when the flatscreen’s showing actual boobs, we do tend to drop our iPhones.) Anyway, Logitech is looking to change all that with the Revue, their Google TV-based set top box, and they’ve been putting out a series of teaser ads to drum up the hype before the stated fall release. All par for the marketing course, and the ads do give out a clear message. Despite the supposed-to-be-cute theme, the TV with the big eye and mouth that keeps popping out of nowhere is a bit freaky though. We haven’t been this freaked out by a TV since Poltergeist.
Check out the ads after the break.
After coming up with more and more connected players with the WD TV Live and Live Plus—both connect to the net, offering streaming media, while the WD TV Live Plus supports Netflix and other paid content—they toned it down a bit with the WD Elements Play, a drive-based media player that drops the price if you don’t mind losing the connectivity.
Asus has just unveiled the latest network media player to fall under their O!Play line, the HD2, during the CeBIT show in Germany. It’s basically a relatively flexible media player that will let you play multimedia files straight off a storage source—that’s either connected via any of its ports and slots or through the network—straight to a TV.
