Entering the already crowded media server market, Nero is pinning the hopes of their MediaHome software-only package on widespread adoption of Universal Plug and Play (UPnP). MediaHome certainly looks interesting, and offers another take on what exactly a media server should be. MORE »

CableWORLD has an interesting interview with Matt Strauss, VP of On Demand programming for Comcast. It’s a good read in its entirety, but the high points are the expansion of on-demand vision from movies to all sorts of other types of programming, and the potential for on demand to give cable providers a huge competitive advantage over satellite. MORE »

Philips continues to do interesting things in the wireless home entertainment area. To complement their Stremium line of A/V devices, the company has announced a partnership with the Dixon group to market the Freeline brand of media center PC’s. Or at least mostly media center PC’s; these run vanilla XP rather than Windows MCE, a curious choice for a PC in this market segment. MORE »

Anyone who’s sat down to rip several hundred CD’s can tell you that it’s not a whole lot of fun. If you haven’t done it yourself, let me tell you… it’s not a whole lot of fun. Riptopia is a new company that sells media players, but with a twist. When you purchase a media player from them, they’ll ship it to you with your CD collection already ripped and uploaded. MORE »

The latest incarnation of HP’s flagship media center PC looks like a pretty sweet machine indeed. With a whopping 400GB hard drive, this is one PC that will have no trouble doubling as a general purpose media server. And, while it’s not a high end gaming machine, its components are perfectly good enough to satisfy all but the most hardcore gamer. MORE »

LG Electronics is joining the wireless TV craze with their own 15-inch offering. Using “802.11b/g”, which sounds a little weird, the device promises to let users take their TV anywhere (including the bathtub, apparently, if you look at the press kit photo closely). MORE »

The Wallflower 2 digital picture frame may finally mark the point at which this kind of thing becomes worth the effort and expense. Unlike previous generations, the Wallflower 2 sports WiFi connectivity and a built-in 30GB hard drive, making it both easy to move content on to and less dependent on the home network and servers (there’s something oddly disconcerting about the idea of rebooting one’s workstation and having all of the pictures in the house go blank). MORE »

Being the helpful people that they are, the MPAA has announced a software package ostensibly aimed at helping parents determine if P2P software and/or illegally downloaded songs or movies are resident on a computer. The tool will then assist parents in removing such software and deleting any purportedly illegal files. MORE »

SBC and Yahoo have announced an expansion of their partnership aimed at improving brand visibility and revenue for both parties. Yahoo will provide numerous services for SBC’s Project Lightspeed customers, and in return SBC will use quite a bit of Yahoo content throughout SBC’s wireless broadband network. MORE »

Grokster, one of the many P2P companies embroiled in lawsuits with the recording industry, and Mercora, a so-far legal streaming service, have announced a partnership that will provide Mercora’s apparently-legal streams to Groksters’ user base, which should be a good thing for both companies. MORE »