This press conference has reached critical mass. We've enough journalists - Intel Spin Doctor
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Toshiba enters the cloud content market
JAPANESE PC MAKER Toshiba has entered the music and video download market, a content arena dominated by Apple and Amazon.
The service, which is called Toshiba Places, will be available via a web browser on a PC or laptop and through a dedicated user interface on Toshiba Regza TVs. Once connected to the portal using a Toshiba ID, users will be able to access a range of content via a series of different 'places'.
The places are split up into different categories such as the video place, music place, news place, game place, app place and services place. For example, users can rent a film from the video place much like the service Apple provides with Itunes.
The music place is for downloading or streaming music, and is powered by 7Digital. The services for sharing video and photos, you can probably work out what they are called, are powered by Flickr and Dailymotion.
Some of the 'places' are accessible via both PC and TV whilst others are limited to one or the other. The video, music and social places work across both both televisions and computers, while news and TV are limited to TV viewers, and game, app and services are for the PC only.
An interesting feature is that users can start to watch a film or video on a laptop, pause it, and then continue watching on a Toshiba TV from the exact point they left off. Toshiba says that "an integrated networking platform also allows users to virtually bookmark their favourite content and share this with friends".
During the rest of this year Toshiba claims it is going to expand and develop the service to support more devices, additional places and compatibility with popular social networks and cloud based storage services. For the TV part of the service, Toshiba plans to create a "central hub that will merge broadcast, broadband and local networks to deliver a unified, content-centric experience to its users".
Sounds like a PC to us. µ
Tags: Hardware
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Can someone please spare us from streaming services? Please tell me that you can cache stuff hours in advance and not have it wait to start downloading until you click on the thing.
Hulu is absolutely fabulous, for example, as long as you don't have congestion on the network. Watching a drama and having the character pause in mid-sentence, start talking again for about 5 seconds then pause again, rinse, repeat, is so incredibly annoying words cannot convey it. I don't mind them making money from putting in commercials in the middle of the show, it's been going on for decades. But can we please cache non-live tv locally? And if the bandwidth is a problem(because you're not guaranteed to watch what you cached) there's this cool technology called the Bit Torrent protocol that is just waiting to get customized by the til now totally moronic entertainment executives.
Oh, and lastly, just because Linux is free doesn't mean we wouldn't be willing to pay for stuff we like. Not all Linux users are criminals that want everything for free, a huge chunk of us don't steal content and resent the fact that the entertainment people like to cowtow(sp?) to Windows and Mac. Just sayin. We're not asking for anything specifically for Linux people, but it would be nice to have a Linux version of some popular stuff.