Toshiba launches a media streamer

TOSHIBA ANNOUNCED its first multimedia hard drive system at a preview of its upcoming products for 2010, seen here on video for the first time.

This media streamer with a hard drive used for storing and playback of media via an HDMI cable is a bolt-on to the company's existing external storage range, with both cost and storage capacity still to be ratified before the product arrives in the third quarter. It will do HD 1080p decoding with content accessed from either the hard drive, an SD card or USB ports. A full list of codecs wasn't available at the announcement, but expect DiVX and WMV to be included as they're already used on existing Toshiba products. The system, which Toshiba calls StoreTV+, will have a WiFi dongle for using the device on a wireless network in order to send content to the box. µ