GigaOM — Yahoo, Now Offering Free Meedio DVR Well you read about Yahoo! buying most of Meedio’s DVR technology to integrate with their GoTV initiative here last week. Now it looks like, according to Om, Yahoo has begun quietly offering the Meedio software itself for download free of charge.
I haven’t tried it yet but will have to check it out. Still, when Media Center is so cheap, and ships as the default operating system these days with most new PCs (and this download is only available for PC users, sorry Appleheads) from places like Dell, you have to wonder about the demand for Meedio. I mean wouldn’t most of the PCs with TV tuners in them these days already have Media Center installed?
It would seem to me that HDTV will be a big driver going forward. Microsoft has announced that there will be CableLABs certified Vista PCs due out with Vista (early next year). DirecTV/TiVo already has a HD DVR out and TiVo’s Series 3 Standalone DVR which will record premium HDTV is expected due out the second half of this year.
What is Meedio/Yahoo’s strategy for tapping the premium HDTV market?
Dave Zatz has some of the screen shots on the service here. From the screen shots that I’ve seen so far I think I’ll be sticking with Media Center for now, but to be fair I will try and test the software out when I’ve got more time. I just don’t see what Meedio gives me beyond what I already get from Media Center which is pretty darn stable these days and has at least given us a road map to how/when they will be offering premium HDTV and with a new beta of Windows Media Player 11 coming out shortly to improve the music library issues on XP. Perhaps if you don’t have Media Center this might be an option.
It does have Flickr and all, which is very cool, but I can use Slickr pretty effectively to incorporate Flickr images easily into my Media Center set up(feel free to test Slickr out with your favorite photographer, Thomas Hawk, by the way!).
Update: Eirik Solheim has given the software a spin first time out and comes back with less than a positive impression:
“Uh-oh. This is crap. It’s at this point I understand that this version of Yahoo! Go for TV does not deserve more of my valuable time. No possibilities for local content from multiple drives. I did not find any way to set up my remote. No flexibility regarding the theme. Actually I didn’t even find a way to change my music directory after finishing the wizard for the first time.”
Yeah, it pretty much left me cold too.
No randomization options for photos (Uh, hello anyone awake there).
No transition effects
Very limited tuner support. Most tuners like dvico work fine through the generic window drivers with 3rd party apps, but for some reason the yahoo offering only has proprietary support for a couple tuners.
No sort albums
Under settings, there is no settings, just a links to various documents like the EUL, weird.
Worked fine with my stream zap remote but the menu structure lacks short cuts, I had to walk all the way back out of the file structure each to time to go somewhere new… I might have missed somthing here but it seemed pretty kludgy to me.
It did work though, played music, pictures and divx files fine without effort. Still nicest thing I can say about it is that it’s free.
-Griffon
Good read, thanks.