MoCA, or Multimedia over Coax, is a technology designed to support the growing networking needs of today’s connected homes, recognizing that many houses don’t have the networking infrastructure needed to connect the latest entertainment devices.

The idea behind MoCA is simple: while most houses today don’t have wired network connections in every room, many have Coax infrastructure that reaches most living spaces. MoCA technology uses that Coax infrastructure by piggy-backing network traffic on those wires without impacting the video signals they already carry.

Today’s MoCA carries network signals at about 175 Mbps with nominal signal loss, making it a better solution for home and Internet video streaming than, say, wireless. Plus, it can be set up to complement your existing network—wired or wireless.

Why you may not have heard about it is that consumers with MoCA in their homes don’t need to worry about it; in fact most don’t even know about it. Some cable and satellite providers rely on MoCA when setting up multi-room DVR and entertainment systems in a home. In many cases, the MoCA technology is built right into the boxes installed by your provider.

That’s starting to change with consumer-oriented MoCA bridges and routers starting to make their way into retailers. Devices like Channel Master’s Coax Adapter let consumers extend their wired networks into bedrooms, dens, and kitchens—locations often inaccessible by wired Ethernet.

MoCA is powered by a chipset created by Entropic Communications. At CES this year, Entropic’s booth showcased a large array of products that currently support or depend upon MoCA for connectivity. As one of the co-founders of the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (also, confusingly, abbreviated MoCA), Entropic continues to improve and expand upon MoCA’s impact in the home. Showcasing MoCA 2.0 at CES, they demonstrated next-generation MoCA networks pushing 400 Mbps over 16 nodes with a mode that supports up to 1Gbps performance under certain conditions.

MoCA’s future certainly seems bright at this point. Every provider of multi-room video solutions we spoke with at CES—TiVo, DISH Network, Arris, Ceton—is building MoCA into their solutions or testing with MoCA adapters. And with MoCA 2.0 rolling out to homes and consumer devices, wireless video stuttering and re-buffering could become a thing of the past.

UltraViolet à la Paramount

Let’s start with Paramount’s UltraViolet offering, in general. You may want to seriously consider those iTunes and Windows Media options, because Paramount’s flavor of UltraViolet doesn’t seem fully baked yet. You need to sign up for yet another account (just like at UVVU, Flixster, Sony, and Universal), so we’re up to five accounts now with only four of the majors in the pool. Once you’ve registered, linked, and logged in, you can redeem, view, and download your Paramount titles.

Paramount's proprietary download manager doubles as the only playback mechanism for their UltraViolet titles

You’ll need to install yet another retailer-specific program to download and play Paramount’s UltraViolet titles offline on your PC or Mac. That’s about where the similarities end.

Like the other studios, Paramount’s site is designed to show you not just their titles, but all of the titles in your UltraViolet locker. At release time and as of this writing, this feature doesn’t work properly. We reported the issue to Paramount’s UltraViolet help desk and promptly received a message from Zukor LLC explaining that “you will only be able to see your Paramount Ultra Violet digital copies.” Actually…not true. The page is there—it’s intended to show the other titles; Paramount’s FAQs clearly state that “you will be able to see your entire UltraViolet library;” oh…and UltraViolet is one word.

Your UltraViolet library on Paramount's site may appear slightly broken

Unlike with every other UltraViolet retailer, the only option for viewing UltraViolet titles on iOS devices is by streaming, over WiFi, from paramountmovies.com. You can’t watch them in Flixster, so you can’t watch them offline on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. To clarify, they’ll show up in your collection in Flixster, but you can’t play or download them there. That also means you can’t watch them on your Google TV and you can’t watch them on your Android phone or tablet. In one test, we couldn’t even stream a title on a 4-month old Windows 7 PC with no explanation as to why.

Paramount’s Digital Store

Paramount is the first retailer to offer direct sales of UltraViolet digital titles. No discs—just the digital copy. They’ve rolled out an initial offering of about sixty titles, ranging from catalog titles Chinatown and the Beverly Hills Cop series to newer releases like Super 8 and the Paranormal Activity trilogy [please let this end as a trilogy]. Purchasing a title couldn’t be easier—select a title to buy, provide your credit card or PayPal account information, and the movie appears in your UltraViolet library. No shopping carts, no redemptions codes. It’s simple.

That’s about the end of the good news. First, let’s talk pricing. While we all might like to think that digital copies should be priced notably less than their packaged equivalents, we know from services like Amazon, iTunes, and VUDU that this is not usually the case. Most digital movies from these retailers cost between 7 and 15 dollars, or 15 to 20 dollars for HD. On iTunes, many of these digital movies do come with extras, like those included with packaged discs.

Paramount’s UltraViolet pricing is higher. Much higher. All catalog titles—whether two years old or fifty years old—are $12.99 in standard definition and $19.99 in HD. Newer titles are $16.99 in standard definition and $22.99 in HD. Many [why not all?] titles are also available to rent by streaming with the usual 30 day/48 hour limitations.

To put this pricing model in perspective, the guys on Seen in HD used this week’s Paranormal Activity 3 release as an example. For the UltraViolet movie in HD (with no extras), Paramount is charging $22.99. On Amazon, you can buy the Blu-ray combo pack with Blu-ray, DVD, and standard definition iTunes, Windows Media, and UltraViolet digital copies for $21.99.

For catalog titles, it’s even worse. Paramount is selling a standard definition UltraViolet copy of Airplane—a thirty year old film—for $12.99. A digital copy of the same movie costs $9.99 on iTunes or $6.49 on Amazon Instant Video. Or you can get a Zucker/Zucker/Abrahams Double Feature DVD including Airplane at Amazon for $9.99.

So there’s that. Then there’s the issue of playback. We already established that you can’t play Paramount’s UltraViolet titles on any disconnected device except for computers running their proprietary player. And since there aren’t any connected TVs or Blu-ray players available yet that support UltraViolet (and even those recently announced depend on Flixster), you probably can’t play these digital purchases on your TV. You can, of course, if you have a home theater PC, but even then you have to play them using Paramount’s custom desktop software, so forget about using your remote control.

HD playback is even more limited. To play Paramount’s HD UltraViolet videos, you must have an HDCP-compliant PC. Forget the Mac—it’s not supported. Your only hope of enjoying HD-quality video is on a Windows Vista or Windows 7 laptop or HTPC connected to an HDCP-compliant monitor with a DisplayPort, DVI-D or HDMI cable. Get all that?

And finally, while the other retailers download UltraViolet movies to your Videos folder as MP4 videos so they’re easily identifiable and transportable, Paramount instead plops thousands of tiny data files on your computer. The video we used for testing comprised 6,630 separate files with clever names like 00a4db57-7774-4907-b155-f054bc12981c. And now all of the other video programs that depend on your Videos folder get to parse through all of that crap.

Paramount clutters your Videos folder with thousands of data files

High Hopes Dashed

It’s widely recognized that UltraViolet has had a rocky start, and we’ve certainly hedged on recommending this technology, but we had high expectations for Paramount. These are the folks with some of the best movie franchises in their catalog, including, The Godfather, Indiana Jones, and Star Trek. Surely they’d want to make a big, successful splash at launch, right?

Instead, this launch is a big mess. It’s buggy, it’s extremely limited, and their digital titles are ridiculously expensive. Perhaps the only redeeming quality here is that Paramount is giving us an out as they continue to include iTunes and Windows Media digital copies in their combo packs. Our recommendation here should be obvious: save your money.

Meanwhile, Fox, a member of the consortium behind UltraViolet, revealed at CES that they do not expect to release titles with UltraViolet until late 2012. According to a report by the Las Angeles Times, Fox executives want to see more retail outlets, more compatible devices, and a common downloadable format.

Accounts of UltraViolet’s success are varied, with representatives from the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), the consortium of vendors behind UltraViolet, lauding it’s success to date and downplaying consumers’ initial frustrations. The president of Warner Home Video, Ron Sanders, states that “consumers are excited about the prospects for streaming and mobile device use with [UltraViolet]” while the press continues to report consumers’ complaints. Meanwhile, Warner’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2—the most successful movie of the year—continues to receive nearly as many one-star ratings as five at Amazon.com…largely in response to UltraViolet.

The “Q”

Ceton’s “Q” is a DVR set-top box that packs tons of features into a nice, stackable form factor. Think Windows Media Center on steroids. But don’t call it that—OEMs building entertainment devices on Windows Embedded are quick to point out that it’s not Media Center. We won’t get into that debate here, but just know that it builds on everything that’s great about Media Center, and the experience is very, very similar.

As you might expect, the “Q” is a CableCARD box, and it’s designed to be your home media hub. The “Q” connects to your network through Ethernet or with a MoCa adaptor. With six tuners, a 2TB hard drive, and a slot-drive Blu-ray player, it’s easy to see how it could ably host and deliver content throughout the household.

The “Q” will come loaded with the features you’d expect in Media Center plus a number of extras. While you won’t be able to install your own add-ins like you might on a Media Center PC, Ceton’s talking about an API and marketplace that we’d imagine might show Microsoft how the Extras Gallery should have been done all along.

Ceton's custom skin persists throughout the interface

They’re also talking about content services—none in particular, but anything would be an improvement over Media Center, since Netflix and CinemaNow are really the only decent options there. More importantly, they plan to integrate an aggregated, universal search feature that will allow you to discover and access content across sources and providers [See Universal Search, below].

The “Q”’s interface comes stylized—skinned, if you will—and it’s customizable. You’ll be able to choose a look that best suits your tastes, including (thankfully) the standard blue aura we’ve all come to recognize.

Ceton says the device will support a wide range of media formats, which we hope means they’ll be including codecs for formats, like .mkv, that aren’t natively supported by Windows Media.

The “Echo”

The "Echo" has a nice, small form factor

Ceton describes the “Echo” as a next generation Media Center Extender. It’s been years since we’ve seen anyone offering extenders to the market, but this device finally gives Media Center households an alternative to the Xbox as a second-room device.

If you already run Media Center in your home, the sleek “Echo” box will deliver all the features you’d expect to see on any Media Center Extender. Paired with the “Q”, it takes on even greater functionality to support the additional capabilities of Ceton’s box, including the ability to customize the look and feel, independent of the appearance of the “Q”’s interface.

You could argue that the handful of first- and second-generation Media Center Extenders failed for two reasons: price and performance. Ceton claims to have addressed both of those problems. The “Echo” boxes we saw were very responsive, both as a Media Center Extender and when paired with the “Q”. As for price, we’ll have to wait and see, but Ceton states they’ll come to market with a “much more attractive price point.”

The “Q Companion”

With tablets and smart phones finding their way into many homes and living rooms, device manufacturers have learned that these second screens provide a rich opportunity for discovering, managing, and controlling media. Ceton plans to take full advantage of this, planning apps for Android, iOS, and Windows phones and tablets.

The "Q Companion" app lets you discover content visually

At their technology preview, Ceton showed prototype apps on Windows Phone and a Windows 8 tablet. They demonstrated features like browsing for movies and shows, searching for content, viewing detailed program information, scheduling recordings, managing your recording priorities, selecting content from online services, and watching movie trailers. Ceton intends to offer these features and more, including the ability to control TV playback.

The idea is that your mobile or tablet device allows you to manage your media hub without disturbing the on-screen experience. And certainly the benefits of using a keyboard and quickly perusing content visually is much more immersive and productive than fumbling through menus and lists with your remote. Outside the home, these apps will give you access to schedule recordings and manage your content remotely.

Universal Search

While add-ins for online content services offer access to vast media libraries, the fragmented experience that individual services’ apps create is frustrating and confusing to consumers. Which service has what content? WHO CARES and why should anyone care? This is a problem plaguing so-called smart TVs with apps, and it’s an issue I’ve personally claimed is one of the biggest issues facing TV usability today.

TiVo has the best provider-independent search and browse capability to date, but throw your own media into the mix—recorded shows and movies, music, and videos—and finding or discovering content gets even more convoluted. Nobody’s solved this problem. Until now.

Ceton plans to introduce a “universal search” solution that aggregates content across services and sources. Browsing and searching for content will yield results from everywhere—online, on TV, or on your set top box. You won’t have to know or care where the media resides. If it’s in your collection, in the program guide, or available through one of their online partners that you subscribe to, it will be included in the results. Select a video, and you’ll be watching it without opening any service’s app and or wading through their menus.

Later This Year

Ceton isn’t talking specifics about timing, price, or services, but they are saying we should expect to see these devices later this year. We often joke that “later this year” is CES code for next year, but we’re optimistic that that won’t be the case here.

From a hardware perspective, Ceton’s devices look pretty close to production ready. We noted that the main set top box lighting was too bright for a home theater environment, but that’s something they intend to correct. Overall, these devices are well-designed and solidly manufactured.

As for the software, they’ve set a very high bar for themselves. Their demos showcased a limited set of capabilities, but from the list of features they rattled off, there’s a whole lot of custom software they need to build and test. We’re talking about content applications, aggregation services, customization tools, and mobile apps for six different devices on three platforms. That’s a whole lot of software engineering!

The most likely candidate for the first product to market would be the “Echo” extender. Because it’s a full-blown Media Center Extender, it can stand on its own without the “Q” platform. Ceton already has retail distribution channels in place to get the product on shelves, both virtual and physical, and that could give them an opportunity to meet an immediate need for Media Center users who don’t want an Xbox in the bedroom.

The timing on the rest of the platform will likely depend on their engineering backlog, CableLabs certification (if necessary), and content partnership deals.

Whether you want to call this Media Center or not, one thing is certain: Ceton has demonstrated a family of entertainment devices that promise to fill a need that many households have today. This multi-room media center hub has the potential to popularize and improve upon one of the best home media platforms available.

Related

Read our original post from CES.

Listen to our interview with Ceton’s Chief Marketing Officer.

Watch this and other videos on our YouTube channel.

Be sure to check all of our CES coverage at The Digital Media Zone.

Acoustic Research may likely change all of that with a new line of power solutions available later this year at affordable prices. Two new power conditioners for the home theater will have 8 or 10 outlets, 2 USB charging ports, dual coax in and out, and network in and out. And two for the home office will have 6 or 8 outlets with 2 USB charging ports, network in and out, and phone in and out. The home office conditioner also powers down a few of the outlets automatically to save energy when you shut down your computer. Prices for these conditioners will range from $59.99 to $79.99.

The more exciting product is the [take a deep breath] PW1000 Power Conditioning Surge Protector with Speedpass. It’s a long name for a very cool device that combines higher-end power conditioning with pass-through device connectivity for your home theater system. It’s designed to sit on your component stack, and in addition to the standard conditioned outlets in the rear, it also includes a 5-port network switch and a bunch of connections under a front panel. These include two more conditioned outlets, a network connection, two USB charging ports, a pass-through USB connector, and a number of a/v pass-throughs.

The pass-through connectors are designed to provide easy access to plug nearly any audio and video device into your entertainment system. And they have quite a lot covered here: component video, composite video, RCA stereo audio, mini-plug audio, coax digital audio, and HDMI.

All of this will come for the surprisingly low price of $249.99. We spoke with Acoustic Research on the CES floor, where they walked us through this new device. Check out our gallery, below, and watch the walkthrough on our YouTube channel.

All of these devices are expected to be available this spring.

Source: Acoustic Research – Press Release

Download the interview or listen, below.

Be sure to check all of our CES coverage at The Digital Media Zone.

We stopped by Dish’s booth and asked for a demonstration and explanation of this tuner wizardry. The answer is rather ingenious: you can set up your Hopper DVR to automatically record the four major networks’ prime time lineup—every night. The Hopper pulls all four networks through one transponder, leaving you with two tuners during prime time hours to record anything else. At any other time of day, all three tuners are available for use.

This feature, called PrimeTime Anytime, keeps eight days’ worth of programming on a separate drive partition, so it doesn’t impact the available space for your own recorded shows. If you can’t watch one of the PrimeTime shows within the eight days, you can save it to your Recorded TV. And if you choose not to enable PrimeTime Anytime, you can use all three tuners at any time of day.

PrimeTime Anytime will be available on Hopper boxes at no additional cost.

Watch the PrimeTime Anytime walkthrough below or on our YouTube channel.

Be sure to check all of our CES coverage at The Digital Media Zone.

The product features uncompressed digital audio transmission for up to 100m within line of sight. It has a new charging base with clearly marked controls and indicators and includes pass-through inputs for analog, digital coax, and optical audio.

Sennheiser expects the product to be available to consumers this quarter for an MSRP of $599.

See our first look at this new product from the CES floor.

TiVo Premiere XL

TiVo has been making some news lately with recent updates to its Series 4 Premier line. This update—which is rolling out now to TiVo premier owners and later in the year for customers using an operator-provided TiVo box—added some nice new features, but customers and analysts are still demanding more. And TiVo today announced some exciting news that will further extend the Premier’s appeal, so we spoke with TiVo’s team at CES to get a better idea of the road ahead.

Processing power

One of the biggest complaints about the initial release of TiVo’s Premier and Premier XL boxes was that they were laggy and unresponsive. The refreshed UI added many new features, but customers couldn’t get past the slow performance. Much of this was because even though the new boxes were built on dual-core systems, only one core was enabled.

Working with its hardware and software partners, TiVo enabled the second core on customers’ Premier boxes this past fall, and this latest release continues to improve performance and stability on the platform.

Multi-room

Tivo’s latest update introduces of true, multi-room streaming between devices. And through select operators, a second-room set-top box called the TiVo Preview, mirrors the TiVo experience in other rooms around the house without the need for additional full-on DVRs in each room.

HD Menus

One of the biggest improvements in this winter’s update is a set of enhancements for the HD guide and menus, which many customers abandoned due to performance and stability issues. The new guide is responsive and even more useful with quick access to Search, program info, and other features. Even the SD menus were tweaked to bring them up to the new look and feel of the Series 4 UI.

And while some users accessing online and legacy features may feel left in the standard definition dust, TiVo assured us that in the future, “you will no longer need to use SD menus if you don’t want to,” suggesting that an HD overhaul for the entire menu system is on the roadmap.

It’s unclear yet whether all legacy content will carry forward, though. KidZone fans have realized early on that the only access to this legacy feature on the Premier was through the SD menus.

Online Content Partners

TiVo continues to work with its content partners to expand and improve its offering. With Hulu, Blockbluster, Netflix, and Amazon, TiVo already has a nice complement of on-demand options. And TiVo’s leading integrated search feature takes users directly to the desired asset, without having to wade through multiple apps’ menus.

While they’re not talking about many specifics, TiVo did say Premier customers can expect a dramatically improved Netflix experience in the first or second quarter. Following Xbox’s lead, Netflix on TiVo will provide content browsing and recommendations, Dolby Digital audio, and support for subtitles. Currently, TiVo users are limited to accessing titles from their Instant Queue.

Third-party apps

TiVo’s access to third-party services and personal content has been fairly limited in the past, but that’s likely to change this year. TiVo today previewed a Developers Kit at the CEA’s Developer University event. This kit will enable third parties to extend TiVo’s capabilities through something of an application ecosystem. TiVo says it will provide access to its APIs to the Series 4 platform over the year. We expect this will be a management development community more like Xbox than, say, Roku.

Actual product announcements were few and far between. Really there were only three things announced. First they discussed Fox apps coming to the Xbox. They are mostly on-demand video streaming from the various Fox brands including regular Fox (Glee, Simpsons, etc.), WSJ Live, Fox News Channel, and IGN. The second announcement was also for the Xbox: Sesame Street TV. It offers interactive episodes of Sesame Street. Now your kids can play along with Elmo and the gang. Release dates weren’t given for either of these products had. The third, and final, announcement of the night was that Kinect on Windows will be launching on Feb 1st. It can be pre-ordered from Amazon for $250.

We decided to chronicle the keynote in images. Peruse through the gallery  to see how the pictures tell the story of this year’s keynote.

Be sure to check all of our CES coverage at The Digital Media Zone.

Press Release:

LAS VEGAS, NV–(Marketwire – Jan 9, 2012) – (NASDAQ: DISH)

 

• Features two-terabyte hard drive for up to 2,000 hours of entertainment
• Never miss a primetime network show with PrimeTime Anytime
• Records up to six programs in HD simultaneously, including PrimeTime Anytime
• Hopper and three small Joeys let viewers watch HD and control DVR in four rooms

 

DISH Network L.L.C., the nation’s third largest pay TV provider, today introduced a whole-home high definition DVR entertainment system featuring the award-winningHopper™ and Joey™.

 

The Hopper HD DVR and accompanying small Joey set-top boxes create a whole-home HD DVR entertainment system that lets DISH customers easily record, pause, and play back shows from any room in the home. While most whole-home DVRs do not have the same DVR functionality on every TV, the Hopper and Joey whole-home system offers the same DVR functionality on every TV, letting customers pause, play and rewind both live and recorded HD programs in up to four rooms.

 

The Hopper was unveiled by DISH CEO Joe Clayton at the 2012 International CES in Las Vegas today, and it is already winning honors as a CES Innovations 2012 Design and Engineering Award honoree. Pricing and packaging will be announced later this quarter.

 

The main Hopper unit features:

 

• Three satellite TV tuners
• A two-terabyte hard drive for up to 2,000 hours of video entertainment
• Up to 250 hours of HD or up to 1,000 hours of SD user recordings
• Bluetooth for linking to devices such as wireless headphones
• Picture-in-picture for watching any two channels simultaneously

 

Combined with a Joey, the Hopper whole-home HD DVR system offers more advanced features:

 

• 750 MHz Broadcom processer — the fastest satellite receiver processor available today for a quick, responsive on-screen guide
• Approximately 50 percent more energy efficient for a four-room installation than previous models
• ZigBee RF4CE using a proprietary protocol remote with “remote control finder” alert
• High definition user interface
• Easy-to-use, fast, graphical, tile-based user interface with predictive search
• Small, sleek chassis for convenient placement

 

“Building on a heritage of award-winning DVRs, DISH is proud to be the first to introduce a groundbreaking product that delivers the most choices for TV entertainment by integrating multiple sources of video into one set-top box,” said DISH Network CEO Joe Clayton. “The Hopper gives our customers network TV shows on demand and thousands of family movie choices streaming or delivered to the hard drive. With its massive storage, the Hopper leads the industry in delivering the most entertainment options, bar none, for every member of the household.”

 

The Hopper — Endless Entertainment Options

 

The Hopper’s new, unparalleled feature, PrimeTime Anytime™ allows customers, with one click, to record using a single tuner all of the primetime TV programming from ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC — the networks that deliver the most popular shows during primetime. Once activated by a customer, PrimeTime Anytime records network programming in high definition, where available, every night and stores them for eight days after they have aired. This creates an on-demand library of approximately 100 hours of primetime TV shows, and makes it easy to catch up on episodes from last night and last week’s airing.

 

The Hopper can record up to six TV shows at once (two live programs and four PrimeTime Anytime shows) while allowing viewers to watch up to four different recorded or on-demand shows in four rooms of the house, simultaneously. This gives a family a variety of options to control or view their recordings and to watch shows in any room from a single Hopper.

 

The Hopper’s on-demand capabilities give access to DISH’s Blockbuster @Home™ for $10 per month which is now enhanced with more than 10,000 total titles streaming to the TV.

 

The Hopper also offers on-demand content for customers with limited or no Internet access with a feature called DISH Unplugged. This feature delivers via satellite hundreds of the most popular movies and TV shows to the hard drive, including transactional and authenticated videos on demand. DISH Unplugged provides a high quality picture without buffering and makes available many of the same streaming movie choices offered by Blockbuster @Home, including premium movie access.

 

And for subscribers of DISH’s America’s Top 120 programming package or greater, the Hopper provides whole-home music distribution from 73 SiriusXM channels, including album art and a unique collapsible list of music channels located at the top of the channel guide at Channel 99, making it faster and easier for SiriusXM music fans to find their favorite music.

 

Additionally, the Hopper will features TV apps that give viewers real time access to Facebook, Twitter, Pandora and photo sharing, as well as games, news, weather, sports, and stock quotes.

 

TV Everywhere

 

Customers can manage the Hopper via the Internet at www.DishOnline.com or the DISH Remote Access app, providing the ability to control DVR recordings on their tablets, smartphones and computers. Connecting the Hopper with DISH’s Sling^® Adapter provides customers the ability to watch and control all live TV channels, PrimeTime Anytime programs and the DVR on their computer, tablet or smartphone wherever they go.

 

The Hopper and Joey are designed and engineered by EchoStar Corporation (NASDAQ:SATS). The Hopper works by distributing HD signals through existing co-axial cable in the home using the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) specification. The Hopper is powered by a Broadcom 750 MHz processor, the most powerful satellite TV processor available today delivering a fast and responsive on-screen guide and a graphical user interface that features channel logos to help search channels, movies or TV shows quickly. The advanced search platform also allows for navigation of programs across satellite TV, broadband and an optional external hard drive.

 

For more information about the award-winning Hopper and Joey by DISH, including technical specifications, please visit www.dish.com/hopper.

 

To watch live TV on the iPad, subscribers need a Sling Adapter from DISH and a broadband-connected compatible DISH HD DVR receiver. More information is available at dishnetwork.com/tveverywhere/remoteaccess.

 

Hopper and Joey images are available at http://press.dishnetwork.com/Press-Center/Photo-Library.

 

About DISH Network

 

DISH Network Corporation (NASDAQ: DISH), through its subsidiary DISH Network L.L.C., provides more than 13.945 million satellite TV customers, as of Sept. 30, 2011, with the highest quality programming and technology with the most choices at the best value, including HD Free for Life. Subscribers enjoy the largest high definition line-up with more than 200 national HD channels, the most international channels, and award-winning HD and DVR technology. DISH Network’s subsidiary, Blockbuster L.L.C., delivers family entertainment to millions of customers around the world. DISH Network Corporation is a Fortune 200 company. Visit www.dish.com.

Source: Dish Network
Be sure to check all of our CES coverage at The Digital Media Zone.

Remember Dragon Mobile? No? Not many do, but the company behind it, Nuance, been around for a while churning out voice-to-text software that’s been allowing smart phone hipsters to search the web using their own human voice (robot voices to come in the near future.) Before Apple’s Siri was an idea, Dragon was a mobile app available on multiple platforms. Now, they’re branching out into the wild world of TVs and set top boxes with a new product they call Dragon TV.

Anticipating the empty space left by an App-less Apple TV, Dragon TV looks to follow in the footsteps of Microsoft’s Kinect in offering voice commands in your living room. Nuance claims its software will be “flexible”. They are targeting television and set-top-box OEMs. It will be on “embedded, connected and hybrid modes”, whatever that means… From the sounds of it most of the hard work is done in the cloud by their servers, not unlike Siri. This should allow for a quick development cycle for a plethora of products. Still, it makes one wonder, if Apple adds apps to their AppleTV, and adds Siri, would that be a game over for Naunce’s Dragon TV and/or Microsoft’s Kinect?

Source: Nuance via TechCrunch

Be sure to check all of our CES coverage at The Digital Media Zone.

So what’s in the update?

• Enhancements to the HD guide, including stability improvements, in both the traditional grid and TiVo list formats
• Easy access to Search from the HD guide
• A new mini guide that floats above the video at the bottom of the screen
• An enhanced information banner, with season and episode number, that’s been moved to the bottom of the screen
• Enhanced information banner when changing channels
• Improved TiVo Search, now including Hulu content results
• Content streaming between TiVo Premier boxes, no longer requiring files to be transferred

Screen Gallery

The Roku Streaming Stick will plug into a television’s MHL-compliant HDMI port, and it requires no other wires—not even power. Note that this does not mean you can just plug one of these guys into any TV’s HDMI port. MHL, or Mobile High-definition Link, is a new standard that is just starting to make its way onto consumer devices. To date, only Samsung and Toshiba are making TVs that support MHL, but we’re likely to see many more devices introduced this year, including Best Buy’s own Insignia brand.

Roku expects the new Streaming Stick to be available to consumers this year at a price point similar to their popular Roku streaming boxes.

Read Roku’s blog post, announcing the new device.

Create a New Account…Again

Like Warner and Sony, Universal requires you to create an online account and link it to your UltraViolet account. That’s four accounts you need now for UltraViolet. Unlike the other UltraViolet sites, you can’t use an email address for your username, so if you were trying to coordinate your account information to make things easier on yourself, you’re out of luck. Also, your Universal account password must be 6-8 characters, which seems oddly insecure considering everything the studios are going through to lock down and protect this content.

Universal’s site is wisely badged with a “beta” flag, and it features a prominent “Let us know what you think!” button to provide feedback. The intent is good, but they appear to lack the support necessary to handle the feedback: we received an irrelevant, generic troubleshooting message in reply to general comments we left about the site.

Plenty of Options

Unlike Warner and Sony, Universal isn’t eliminating its other Digital Copy formats in favor of UltraViolet. Instead, UltraViolet is an available option in addition to a Digital Copy through either iTunes, VUDU, or Amazon Instant Video. That’s right: you have a choice. How customer-friendly! Warner and Sony should take notice; Paramount may already have, since they recently announced the January release of a new Dark of the Moon combo pack with UltraViolet and Digital Copy. This not only gives consumers options, it gives the studios metrics they can use to determine which format(s) their customers prefer. Now we just have to hope that the studios are watching.

Universal lets you redeem an UltraViolet copy and one of three other Digital Copy formats

Universal throws in a second UltraViolet title for free when you redeem your Cowboys & Aliens code. In our test, the selection was limited to picking between Dazed and Confused and Being John Malkovich.

Streaming and Downloading

Universal’s UltraViolet titles can be streamed on all UltraViolet streaming devices, including Macs and PCs through a browser with the Flash plug-in and supported mobile devices and Google TV through Flixster. Video quality in the browser is good (nearly a 2 Mbps bit rate), but we experienced jerks and tears, even on a powerful, Gb Ethernet-connected computer. Universal’s site shows titles from other providers, but they’re presented in a way that seems unnecessarily disjointed.

UltraViolet Titles from other providers appear disabled, with a buried link to Flixster

Universal’s UltraViolet titles can also be downloaded, but here’s where it gets confusing. From Universal’s site, you can download the purchased title, Cowboys & Aliens, to a PC, but you cannot download the free title. You cannot download titles to a Mac from Universal’s site, but you can download both titles to a Mac from Flixster.com to play offline in the Flixster Collections desktop software. You can also download either title to your mobile device through Flixster.

Downloading the UltraViolet copy of Cowboys & Aliens to a PC requires that you install yet another desktop application, and it’s an arduous process requiring the following steps:

• On Universal’s site, click Download.
• Download and run the installer file CowboysAndAliens_UV_3.exe.
• Click Install once the installer runs.
• Sign in to your Universal account.
• When the installer completes, the Download Manager will run; wait for the download to complete.

What's with the big red button?

The Cowboys & Aliens installer leaves a mess of stuff in the Start menu

By default, Universal’s UltraViolet titles download to the Public Videos folder on your Windows computer. Unlike the downloadable content from all of the other studios offering UltraViolet, these are in Windows Media (.WMV) format, and the video quality is surprisingly good. Cowboys & Aliens is a 720 x 320 widescreen video with a bit rate of over 6 Mbps. The digital rights on the file include the ability to sync to a device capable of playing subscription files, so presumably you could play this on your Windows Phone and legacy Zune devices. And unlike the titles from any of the other UltraViolet partners, it will appear and play in Windows Media Center.

Conclusions

Universal’s first UltraViolet offering seems like a cautious test, complete with a low-budget toolset and plenty of digital alternatives. And while the differentiated online and download experience might further confuse the market, this may well be a studio’s best UltraViolet adoption to date solely because Universal is not abandoning previously-offered Digital Copy options. If anything, they’re giving you more options than ever before. With just one combo pack purchase, we received unlimited UltraViolet streaming, a downloadable UltraViolet copy (that plays in Flixster’s clunky software), a downloadable Windows Media file, and a downloadable iTunes movie with iTunes Extras (similar to DVD bonus features). Plus Universal threw in an additional movie for free.

Clearly Universal just raised the bar. Now can someone please work on making it all usable? This is all still way too complicated for mere mortals.