CES 2018 – SilconDust
Even when they don’t have a lot to show off, it’s always nice to stop by and visit with SilconDust. Fortunately that wasn’t the case this CES, with several new and interesting things on offer.
- We will finally be seeing that six stream Digital Cable Tuner (DCT). It will retail for $199 and should arrive mid-year.
- The CONNECT lineup has been redesigned with modern hardware in, and out, also adding a quad-tuner to the standard CONNECT lineup. The updated silicon should net some impressive power saving gains as well, with the new quad-tuner requiring about what the old dual-tuner did. The refresh impacts both the US and EU markets.
- SilconDust has added a “Duo+” model to the CONNECT family as well. The “+” indicates that it includes a 250GB hard disc drive (HDD) in case, and has the recording software installed, making it a complete DVR solution with zero-effort. This will make it a lot easier, and approachable (no NAS requirement), for casual buyers to cut the cord or at least move closer to that goal. Unfortunately the Duo+ was not at the show, so no pictures are available in the gallery. Like the other tuners, users can view live TV without a subscription cost. To enable DVR capability a $30/year-per-household fee is applicable. This will enable as many tuners as the network can support :).
- SilconDust has also partnered with Western Digital to make it incredibly easy to use their entry level My Cloud NAS products. With the tuners able to auto-discover and provision the recording engine automatically.
- We can also look forward to a redesign of the DVR application’s user interface (UI). With big gains in usability the main target.
- Unfortunately, “protected” cable content is currently limited to Microsoft Windows 10 and Xbox platforms. SilconDust is working to re-enable it on Android, as well as other platforms.