One of my favorite CES Press Conference speakers is Netgear’s Vice President and General Manager of Home and Consumer Products, Vivek Pathela. Vivek always gives a fun and energetic presentation of Netgear’s latest and greatest. This year was no different and announced several new gadgets including a new media server called the Netgear Stora. Highlights after the break.
NETGEAR Stora ™ (MS2110), an easy-to-use home media storage server that provides consumers with anytime, anywhere access to their digital media on any screen. Stora enables customers to access, back up and centralize photos, music, movies and files using nearly any network device, including laptops, Macs®, PCs, smartphones, gaming consoles, networked Blu-ray™ players and HDTVs. A smooth and powerful user interface for both local and remote users unleashes home network content for use on nearly any device, at home or away.
The Digital Entertainer Express is a powerful and flexible digital media player that enables serious media enthusiasts to easily enjoy and seamlessly stream personal digital media collections and Internet content over home networks to HDTVs. The unique technology of the Digital Entertainer Express enables consumers to seamlessly stream M2TS via pre-buffering and play Blu-ray quality digital video up to 1080p. They can also play MP3, multichannel WAV and FLAC files and high-resolution digital photos from PCs, Macs® or Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, such as the NETGEAR Stora and ReadyNAS®. Consumers can also enjoy Internet content, such as Internet radio (over 250 stations), Flickr™, RSS feeds and videos from popular websites.
Wireless-N 300 Router with DSL Modem – Mobile Broadband Edition (DGN2200M) offers dual Wide Area Network (WAN) options for Internet access: to a DSL network via a built-in ADSL2+ modem and to a high-speed cellular network via an external 3G/4G/WiMAX USB modem. It is the first wireless-N router in the retail market to offer customers an automatic DSL-to-3G/4G/WiMAX cellular failover feature in case of a DSL outage — ideal for small businesses that need a reliable backup Internet connection with zero downtime.
The NETGEAR Powerline 200 AV Adapter Kit (XAVB2001) is up to 50 percent smaller than competing products and utilizes the latest in powerline design and technology to offer throughput and speeds up to 20 percent better than competing solutions over extended locations.
Enhancing SD to Near-HD
There has been an explosion in digital media, and online video viewing is more popular than ever. However, the quality of the majority of these online, user-generated videos is often sadly deficient. NETGEAR is incorporating new technologies into its products that transform standard-definition videos into near HD quality by enhancing contrasts and color, and reducing the graininess, mosquito noise and block artifacts. The live demo of this was quite stunning, they showed the power of this, I’m not sure if I buy that the clip they showed was exactly the same because the difference between the unenhanced version was shockingly different.