MediREADY grew out of a company called Video Without Boundaries that designed products for the corporate environment. In 2002, it began focusing on consumer electronics that allowed people to manage digital media in the home – first photos and music, and later video.

The company’s newest product, the MediaREADY MC, is a broadband-enabled set-top box with bells and whistles galore. Like the NeuLion set-top box, the MediaREADY MC connects to a broadband modem or home network, streams broadband video to the television screen and performs DVR functions like recording, searching and playing back television programs. But that’s where the similarity ends.
 

The Media Jukebox

The MC is a “media jukebox,” streaming content to the television from almost anywhere – from the computer’s hard drive, from USB-connected memory devices, MP3 players or cameras, from CDs or DVDs. It also manages media libraries. It has Bluetooth support for headsets, gaming consoles, remote controls and keyboards. Higher-end versions of the device include high-definition tuning and software tools for custom installers to use in setting up elaborate home theaters.

And that’s not all. The MediaREADY MC offers unlimited access to the Internet through the Firefox browser. The Web interface defaults to a portal that guides users to services that tend to work well on a television screen, such as video, music and banking. But users are free to visit any Web site they want to. “We handhold the average person and guide them to places where they’ll be happy with the experience, while giving them the flexibility to go elsewhere,” explains MediaREADY EVP David Novak.

The portal also directs users to communications services like e-mail, instant messaging and VoIP. “Basically, it does anything that becomes interesting in the living room,” Novak says.

But that’s still not all. Unlike earlier generations of MediaREADY devices, the MC can multitask. A user can watch a DVD and conduct a VoIP phone call at the same time, while reading a broadband news ticker at the bottom of the screen – all without impacting quality.

What MediaREADY Doesn’t Do – and Why

There are applications that the MediaREADY MC isn't optimized for – notably office applications and gaming – and those omissions are deliberate. People like to work on office applications in their home offices and to play games in the den or bedroom.

Novak believes that Media Center PCs (computers designed to operate Windows XP Media Center) have suffered from trying to be both PC and media center. It's not just that consumers use the Media Center PC in the office instead of the living room, he says; they also complain about contention between office applications and media applications. Similarly, because Microsoft’s Xbox is targeted at gamers, who are often exiled from the living room by non-gaming family members, its general-purpose capabilities may go unused. MediaREADY, on the other hand, is optimized for media applications that tend to be used in a single location, the living room.

While NeuLion has a “narrowcast” strategy, MediaREADY casts as wide a net as possible. Its market may be limited by disposable income (the base model of the MC, with a suggested retail price of about $800, is about four times the price of the NeuLion set-top box.), but is not limited by interest in specific content. In spite of the enormous number of functions the MC performs, the company has worked at making the device easy to set up. It also tries to make it easy for users to access as many different services as possible.

In contrast to NeuLion’s relationships with content providers and aggregators, MediaREADY avoids exclusive relationships. It acts as a Web affiliate, guiding users from its portal to content providers it thinks are appropriate and taking a share of ad revenues. “As we get bigger and have more eyeballs, we can change that model and start offering premium content,” Novak says. “We can bring that up in the interface and showcase it for a larger percentage or a flat fee from the provider. But I don’t want to stop you from going to other services.”

The ability to stream pictures from broadband to TV has been available for several years. The reason it’s starting to take off today, Novak says, is content: “YouTube and Myspace – content that’s wildly different from what the Internet has seen before. Those kinds of services, as well as VoIP and videoconferencing, will really drive television as an access point. Devices like ours will become more relevant to the consumer’s life….It’s the content and services that will make it into a mainstream product.”