LIVEdigitally - EHX Fall 2004: Philips

For several years now, Philips has offered two innovative product lines for the digital, connected home: the Pronto remote and the Streamium networked stereo components. Well, it appears that some upgrades have happened, and the company has gotten pretty serious at enabling control and connectivity in the home.

The new Streamium "Wireless Multimedia link" device resembles a DVD player, with a front-panel LCD interface and a television-based graphical user interface. The system is able to stream music, photos, and videos from a networked PC in the home to a TV set. The package includes some PC software for organizing and serving media files to the Streamium unit.

The on-screen graphical user interface (GUI) is part of the new "Connected Planet" vision, with a basic "two-pane" concept. The left pane lets you navigate through categories and folders, and the right pane shows the results of your selection. Conceptually, I really liked the GUI. In practice, I found it quite unattractive, and often very sluggish to my controls. Also, I often found myself feeling "lost" in the menu structure, and kept finding the wrong media types in the screens I was browsing (for example, while looking at music, I saw a list of the movie clips stored in the video folder). I think this needs to go back in the oven and cook a bit more before it's really ready for mainstream, or even higher-end, consumers.

The remote control, on the other hand, was quite nicely put together. The interface allowed me to browse available networked devices (using Universal Plug and Play, aka UPnP, technology), select content, and initiate playback. Also, the screen on the remote is attractive enough to show photo previews, so you can select a photo before it appears on the TV set. Nice feature, although I don't really think it warranted the cost of putting a color LCD screen on the remote. Especially after I saw how nicely the team at Sonos did it (read the next article for that review).

Fundamentally, I think Philips is on the right track. While I didn't get enough personal time with either the Streamium or the remote, I have a feeling it wouldn't really meet my needs yet. Then again, these are just software problems, and the platform itself is sound enough to support some upgrades. Maybe I just need to wait for version 1.1.

Pictures of the products (click on the image for a full-screen view):
Streamium unit

Television graphical user interface

PC software

Remote control interface

NEXT... Sonos (whole home music system)