Digital Home Thoughts: Viewsonic Unveils Media Server and Wireless Media Adaptor

"The gateway is essentially a media server that can store movies (homemade or otherwise), music, and pictures on its own hard drive. You move such media to the gateway from a home computer: "It's totally drag and drop, and you can use a PC, a Mac, or Linux--it shows up as network-attached storage," says Trevor Bratton, ViewSonic's senior public relations specialist. The adapter plugs into a TV and connects wirelessly to the gateway, getting video and other content into the living room or wherever else the user has a TV. In fact, Bratton says that one of this system's advantages over existing video-streaming approaches is that multiple adapters can talk to one gateway, so family members can watch streaming video in both the den and the living room, for example."

Pretty cool concept! The seems to be a network attached storage device (NAS) that is designed to work with a wireless media adaptor that you'd attached to a TV. From the sounds of it, they're using UPnP so that Windows-based computers will automatically see it. Likely Samba for Linux, and Rendezvous (?) for Mac. The only down side is the price: $699 for an 80 GB version seems a bit expensive to me (nevermind it's not big enough for all my media). What would be exceedingly cool would be if there were USB/Firewire ports on it so that you could attach other external drives and have them mesh together as a single drive. Now THAT would be cool. 8)