Roberto Mateu

After moving to Norway I finally broke down and bought an AppleTV. I’m loving it. While I rent a couple of movies a moth, I mainly use it for TV Shows: The West Wing, South Park, The Big Bang Theory, Psych, Mad Men, etc. And although I have converted some “alternative method” downloads to play on it, I’m mostly buying them from iTunes store.

Still two Media Players and an App have caught my attention recently:

1. SlingCatcher: Goes for $299.
   • Being a Slingthingy, it streams from other slingboxes, which I really don’t care for.
   • It also streams video from your Mac or PC, so you can be watching Lost on abc.com, SNL on hulu.com or even videos on netflix.com and you can see it on your tv. Quality appears to be great
   • It plays any content you put on a USB drive. Which makes a very useful when you get most of your content from bittorrent and other alternative sources.
2. WD TV HD Media PLayer: Goes for $129 (but you can find it at BestBuy for $99)
   • This set top box only plays content from a USD Drive. But seems pretty straight forward.
   • The UI doesn’t seem that elegant compared to the SlingCatcher.
3. Boxee: Free software, invite only now.
   • There is no technical reason why the AppleTV shouldn’t be able to play video downloaded from the Internet. Or even to read data from its USB port.
   • Of course the problem is … Apple. No point in going into the why’s or how’s
   • Boxee is an media center software for Win/Mac/Linux and AppleTV.
   • Boxee fixes most of these issues in a easy way.
     • You can play content from Hulu, CBS, etc
     • Stream Divx, and other formats from your pc, mac.
   • Boxee also adds a SocialNetwork layer on top of all this, don’t know how useful or cool it is. But it has the buzzword compliant feature.

You can always just connect your computer to the TV. But that would be uncivilized, wouldn’t it?

After looking at some leaked shots of the HTC Dream running Android, I’m going to venture and say that this device is going to be as successful as the Moto ROKR E1. While I’m excited about the possibilities of the Android platform, the pics flying around from the device are pretty boring. Especially if you compare it to other phones from the HTC Touch family.

I think HTC is delivering on Google’s practical-yet-unsurprising spec sheet. And they are learning a whole lot doing it. The breakthrough device will come in a couple of months when HTC delivers their own branded handset, and reap the full benefits of its sales.