Many folks were left scratching their heads when Dish Network bought up the crumbled shell of Blockbuster. The once mighty movie rental chain had been felled in large part by Netflix’s DVD-by-mail rental service, with Netflix’s streaming service and Redbox’s kiosk rental model swooping in for the final kill. Not that Blockbuster didn’t try to fight back. It was in […]
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One of the more intriguing media streamers to come out this year is the Roku Streaming Stick. The Roku Streaming Stick is a media streamer designed to be plugged into the MHL port on your TV or other device, and indeed we have already seen some Insignia TVs sporting the Roku Ready logo that Roku has come up with for certified […]
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Netflix tooks it first tentative steps into the world of original programming with Lilyhammer, a series developed in conjunction with a Norweigan production company. However, Netflix also has a couple of series coming up that the company has taken on all by itself. The first up will be House of Cards. Backed by David Fincher and Kevin Spacey, Netflix made […]
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I know what I will be doing this weekend. I’m all for beta software, but media center software usually has to at least hit the release candidate stage before I am willing to try it out on the rest of the family. Well, OpenELEC 2.0 RC1 has been released and I have just the system to try it out on. For […]
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Microsoft isn’t the only company looking to conquer the living room with a streaming music service this month. Rhapsody has been quite prolific, developing apps for just about every mobile device ecosystem one can think of, but now the company is looking to engage consumers in their living rooms. Rhapsody has announced that their music app is now available for […]
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MythTV has received an update, bringing the venerable FOSS media center program up to version 026. This latest version comes only six month after the release of version 0.25. Given that I am fairly certain the dinosaurs came and went in time between versions 0.24 and 0.25, version 0.26 had a relatively short development cycle, which might be part of […]
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Google entered the new year with big plans for Google TV. The platform was moving from Intel Atom chips to ARM SoCs, Sony was returning as a hardware partner and throughout the year the list of manufactures kept growing as companies like Vizio, LG, and Hisense announced Google TV products. Although standalone boxes dominate the scene for media streamers, Google […]
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I’ve been thinking of building a new home server, and though I won’t need a new case for this particular upgrade, if I did, then there would really only be two attributes that would concern me: hard drive bays and silent performance. It’s quite possible that the BitFenix Ghost would have made my short list at some point. The Ghost […]
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Microsoft announced Xbox Music at E3 this year, and then promptly stopped talking about it. Rumors swirled that Microsoft was looking into adding a digital locker service similar to iTunes Match to complement the Zune-rebranded services already in place. Now more rumors are swirling that Xbox Music will finally launch on October 26. To be fair, this isn’t exactly a […]
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Hey look, everybody! Logitech has announced a new Harmony remote control. That’s right, the Logitech Harmony Touch that Best Buy started selling over the weekend now officially exists. While it is certainly nice of Logitech to acknowledge the existence of the new remote control, there was not much to announce that we hadn’t already learned from the box that ashoemaker […]
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