Netgear knocks it out of the park at CES
January 7th, 2007 by Jeremy ToemanOpening disclosure: I am working on a consulting project with Netgear, but that work is unrelated to my blogging about them. I was invited to their press conference and chose to attend and got to see three new products that I was previously unaware of. This blog post is because I am genuinely amazed with a product of theirs.
Now, onto the story. Netgear had a press conference this morning and unveiled three new products which I will list and describe in ascending order of excitement and interestingness. Before the demos, Debbie Williams (Netgear’s Chief Marketing Officer) gave a brief “state of the union” for the company. Basically: 10 years old, market cap of $883M, products sold in >16K retailers, and they introduced 50 new products in 2006 (methinks about 42 of them were routers, but I guess it counts anyway, right?). She then went on to discuss how 2006 was the year of building the home network for the digital lifestyle (love that term, but I think I may have heard it before), and 2007 is the year of delivering the experience. She then introduced Vivek Pathela, Netgear’s VP of Product Marketing to do the demos (again, listed here in my order, not theirs):
Storage Central Turbo. This updates 2005’s Storage Central device by adding the capacity to expand to multiple terabytes of data as well as gigabit Ethernet. If you aren’t paying attention to the bits and bytes, it means it can store and stream HD movies around your house. This is a fairly evolutionary/logical enhancement to the product line. The MSRP is $249 (with no included hard drives, which makes sense since it’s so much cheaper for you to buy your own anyway) and the product should ship “early” this year. More pics:
Dual-Mode Cordless Phone with Skype. Now we’re seeing some interesting convergence happen. Quite a few companies introduced Skype or VoIP phones in 2006, some worked well, some didn’t. Netgear seems to have added a clever twist by incorporating a standard telephone in the same handset (aka Plain Old Telephone Service, or POTS). This is a very smart combination, as it lets a consumer have just a single home phone that can work with both Skype and POTS systems. Also, you can get multiple handsets all working with the same base station (although an audience member asked a great question: can more than one handset make a simultaneous POTS call? which stumped the Netgear team – I sure hope it’s a yes). The demo went great as Vivek called Patrick Lo, Netgear’s CEO, and had a quick live call with near-excellent audio quality. MSRP $199, available now (on Amazon)!
EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD. Oh my is this one interesting. It’s a, well, “box” that hooks up to your TV and your home network connection. It then streams your music, photos, and videos from any PC or networked storage device (NAS) to your TV. It also streams from YouTube (they demoed a classic Diet Coke/Mentos video, which about 90% of the audience reacted as if they’d never seen it before - wow). It also works in high definition (up to 1080p resolution), including full upscaling/downscaling of video. It supports almost every video codec, including MPEG-4 HD, WMV HD, DivX, MPEG-2, H.264, etc etc. It also streams iTunes (including protected content if from a Windows PC, sorry Mac folks). It also has USB to locally connect a flash drive or an iPod. It also supports multiple units so you can start a video in one room, then finish it in another. It also has full PVR (TiVo-like) capabilities. And from the demo, it looks like it works very well! As a guy who has spent about 8 years designing award-winning devices just like these, I am quite impressed. Quite! MSRP $349, available early 2007.
I’ve seen a bit of other coverage already of the conference. MacUser compares it against iTV and calls the UI “uninspired” which is a fair point, but I think making comparisons against a product that’s not really been “announced” yet isn’t quite appropriate. Also, I disagree that Apple will beat the $349 price point, as I think they’d rather rip into their loyal customer base who are more willing to overpay for the Apple brand. More coverage from Ed Kohler, Eric Savitz at Barron’s, Gadgetell, and SciFi.com, but for very extensive details, here’s the Engadget transcript. I also bumped into Dave Zatz (with Sakshi Goel of Netgear), Netgear’s resident CES blogger.
So there’s my front-runner for most interesting new product of CES: the Netgear Digital Entertainer HD. We’ll see how the rest of the show pans out! More Netgear conference pics below and the whole CES collection is here.
January 8th, 2007 at 9:50 am
[...] Netgear Knocks It Out of the Park at CES (LIVEdigitally) [...]
January 9th, 2007 at 12:44 am
[...] Netgear Introduces Super Charged HDTV DVR – Netgear made their splash into the DVR market in a big way by introducing their EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD. What this unit lacks in it’s name, it makes up for with it’s capability. Not only does it offer full HDTV DVR capabiities, but it also allows you to stream music, photos and video on the net directly to your television. It supports nearly every codec including WMV, DivX and iTunes and even allows you to watch YouTube on your TV. It can upscale or downscale video to the optimum resolution for your set. It retails at a slim $349 and debuts in early 2007. [...]
January 10th, 2007 at 11:47 am
[...] Netgear Knocks It Out of the Park at CES (LIVEdigitally) [...]
January 11th, 2007 at 7:13 am
[...] I just took a brief gander at the $299 iTV (now branded Apple TV), and am disappointed with the first rev of their software. First off, early reports pegged this device at a max output of 720p (which would have been OK with me) but Apple’s tech specs clearly indicate this will handle video at up to 1080i. What I’m bothered with as a consumer is that a Mac or PC is needed as an intermediary for iTunes video purchases. With a 40GB hard drive, it’s probably safe to say at some point they’ll take the computer out of the equation… right? For $100 more you could pick up an Xbox 360 with TV and Movie downloads direct to the console, no PC required. Oh yeah, you can do a bunch of other stuff too. The second issue I have is that Apple continues to lock us into their ecosystem — A model that has worked well for them with audio, but may not be as successful with video in the era of YouTube and DivX: The iTV has limited video format support compared to products like Netgear’s new Digital Entertainer HD. Good, bad, or just average – I’m sure Apple will move a decent amount of product. They build sexy looking hardware and software, and have the marketing game figured out. However, they can’t count me as an early adopter. I’ll be looking forward to Matt’s review if/when he picks up a box. [...]
February 13th, 2007 at 10:13 am
[...] Ironically, Netgear has gone on to hire Jeremy to do some consulting work for them and initially he is going to be helping to develop out the Netgear blog that Dave Zatz guest blogged on at CES this year. I had also applied to be a Netgear guest blogger for CES, but lost out to Dave. I’ll be excited to watch how Jeremy uses his expertise to build out and optimize Netgear’s blog. He writes some really great reviews, one of my favorite articles from CES this year was Jeremy’s review of Netgear’s EVA8000 Digital Entertainer HD. This machine looks really hot. Hopefully, it won’t take long before Netgear turns on comments and starts up an RSS feed to make it easier to monitor the site. [...]
November 7th, 2007 at 10:11 am
The Netgear Eva8000 is a great product on paper and if you enjoy lock ups, freezes, reboots and frequently crawling around unplugging and replugging in your eqiupment when it’s locked. The picture quality however is fantastic
I bought 2 Eva8000’s for separate rooms. They’re both pathetic. I have had the previous model (EVA700) for about 6 months. This has a completely different (more basic) interface and, unlike the EVA8000, is an absolute pleasure. It seems that Netgear are not content with only releasing crap hardware (EVA8000), installing Netgear’s Digital Entertainer software causes certain files to bomb out when played in windows. This leads to Media Centre (both XP & Vista versions) to completely crash (regardless of which other codecs are installed – I tried numerous combinations and versions including just the latest divx & xvid official codecs).
Removing the Netgear software makes Media Centre work again every time. The best thing one can say about the Netgear software is “it uninstalls well”. If my Eva8000 were to catch fire it would improve my life as I would stop the futile exercise of trying to get it to work without locking up or rebooting (and yes I do have the latest firmware).
Rebooting takes about 2 minutes and then one has to rescan the media library which takes about 15 minutes for 3000 files. The cheaper Eva700 is practically instant on and adding media doesn’t require a rescan. Why didn’t they just keep the Eva700’s operation, “Windows Media Connect” software and add hi-def capabilities? This would have made the Eva8000 an unbeatable product.
Although I am a fan of Netgear products the EVA8000 is a piece of crap. I cannot believe anyone would actually sell something so buggy. I’d rather have smallpox than another EVA8000. If you can find one…get the EVA700. It isn’t high-def, but it works flawlessly.