<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" LAS VEGAS \u2014 The room was packed, but I got a place up front where I had a good view of the huge projector screen on which they were showing a promotional video\u2014lots of quick clips to the background of the obligatory lame trance music. (That&amp;#039;s okay\u2014I make lame trance music, so I like it just fine, and I think I recognized some of the samples from a commercial sample disk by BT that I own!) Why the music? Maybe its beat-per-minute rate, which is supposed to affect the audience (hence the name) is supposed to put the journalist in a more receptive mood. I can&amp;#039;t see that it works, so far. The Netgear folks had cool swag\u2014they were giving away compact travel routers. Their pitch was on the &amp;quot;Digital Lifestyle Experience,&amp;quot; which boils down to sharing all your digital media throughout your house: &amp;quot;Any content, any room, any time.&amp;quot; The main gadget they were pushing, the Digital Entertainer HD, is supposed to discover all the digital content on all the computers on your network and let you play it on any and all TVs connected to a Digital Entertainer box. The demo looked pretty good\u2014they even brought in the YouTube video of Diet Coke / Mentos explosions and commented &amp;quot;Folks, you can&amp;#039;t get this on broadcast TV!&amp;quot; How true. There&amp;#039;s also Tivo-like personal video recording. I thought the YouTube video looked pretty good for YouTube, and it turned out during questions that the box upsamples it before sending it to the TV. The Digital Entertainer is supposed to make TV and audio seamless\u2014you can even pause a movie in one room and resume it on another TV in a different room\u2014but there were a lot of pretty tough questions in the following Q&amp;amp;amp;A session that made me wonder just how smooth things might be in actual operation. In fact, that&amp;#039;s my real question: No matter how well these things work in demonstrations (and this one worked fine, though there was a microsecond of panic on the presenter&amp;#039;s face when it looked like it was going to stop at one point), a really impressive demonstration would be to call a couple of people out of the audience and have them set something like this up, cold, in just a few minutes. For these kinds of things, that&amp;#039;s the real acid test, and one that manufacturers will have to pass if they want them to sell in big numbers. This looked like it might be a cool box, but it struck me as more of the same kinds of things people have been promising, if not quite delivering, for the past couple of years. Evolutionary, not revolutionary. Of course, if it turns out to be easy to set up and reliable, that will be revolutionary! \u2014Glenn Reynolds VIDEO: Netgear Announces HD Video-Streaming Settop Box  Click here for all of Instapundit Glenn Reynolds&amp;#039; blogging for Popular Mechanics from CES, and here for PM&amp;#039;s complete coverage of CES 2007. Plus, sign up for daily e-mail updates from Las Vegas.  Netgears Digital Entertainer HD (CLICK TO ENLARGE) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a1189/4209999/>