Yesterday, HP announced it will be discontinuing its MediaSmart Connect line. Last Friday, Linksys announced their range of media extenders are also getting the boot. The standalone network media player, for all intents and purposes, has proven a failure – and rightly so, in my opinion.
While I personally appreciate streaming my downloaded pirated content (yes, I do) over to my HDTV, there are other ways to accomplish it that doesn’t require a $300+ set-top box that doesn’t do much else. With nettop PCs, game consoles and other media equipment now able to do majority of what these devices do, it’s really a hard sell at this day and age. Of course, Apple TV, which simplified the process to the level of idiots, is still alive, even though it hasn’t really sold as much as the company would have probably liked.
I used to call them souped-up NAS drives, although they’ve enjoyed numerous monikers (digital media extenders, media streamers, set top boxes, etc), with none really becoming a standard (a glaring sign that consumers didn’t understand what they did exactly). While I did consider getting Netgear’s Digital Entertainer Elite once, I decided it wasn’t all it was cut out to be (which I’m pretty sure most tech-savvy consumers thought of as well).
As an alternative, you can now find all-in-one boxes that handle network media streaming along with a whole lot more functionality, bundling features that you can use even without a PC server running nearby (e.g. Tivo, Moxi). For me, an old PC with a high-end video card that connects directly to my network is all the set-top box I need – it’s ugly, but it gets the job done.
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