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Technology Events BLOG Archive
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December
19th, 2003 - Interact TV's Rockin Telly I entered and immediately met Ken who has read hair and a welcoming handshake. He showed me into a conference room where they had the Telly up and running. The DirectTV signal was feeding the Telly with the latest news and their handy electronic programming guide (EPG). This simple box has an excellent PVR and you can download programs and music easily. This powerhouse packs two optical disc drives for easy playback and recording of DVDs. It can hold 3 disk drives and comes with a standard 80 GBs. You can upgrade this with standard disk drives so that you could buy an off-the-shelf 120 GB disk drive for $100 and have one of the most powerful PVRs for $1,000. The Telly does alot more than record video. They have great navigation screens that can access audio libraries, video recordings and the latest news, weather and financial information. The Telly has a Web Server so that you can program it from any Web-enabled device. If you forget to record a show while your on the road, just log into your Telly and you'll have full functionality from anywhere on the Web. They had a wireless tablet in the room that could be used to control the Telly. I was about ready to start playing with it when Ken and Tom entered. We immediately got into techno-babble about their invention. Interact TV is the new incarnation of Evolving Video Technologies which was another company that Ken had started. After selling EVT to RT-SET, he had teh capital to start Interact TV. They started shipping the Telly in July. Two weeks ago, they released the Telly's little brother, the MC800. The MC800 is $150 less and would be adequate for most users since it still holds 2 disk drives. Interact TV is looking for niche markets to serve since the cable and satellite companies aren't very interested in their box without much DRM. Interact TV is also not very interested in becoming the slave that the big satellite and cable companies will turn you into. It's difficult to sell to these behemoths, but it is also difficult to sell to niche markets. Ken and Tom were very forthcoming with their logic behind the Telly's creation. Ken will dive into any aspect of the Telly without holding back any technical detail. He's definitely into his Telly as he should be. We talked for two hours without a demo, so I came back another night to see the Telly in action. Ken sat down in his white lounge chair and assumed control of the Telly. He showed me how the Telly needs to be configured with your address so that you can get local weather, news and movie listings. Interact TV has teamed up with a lot of content providers to supply the EPG and local content nation-wide. The initial take on the Telly is that it is a modular entertainment server that is packed with power. Interact TV keeps a close relationship with their customers and has many ideas for future products that would scale up or down to meet everyone's needs. I'm going to review the Telly in the new year when I get an evaluation copy after CES.
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