Seagate Technology and Western Digital are two Californian companies that dominate the global hard drive market and are in constant, close competition with one another.
Western Digital overtook Seagate in the first three months of 2010 in hard drive shipments for the very first time on a quarterly basis, according to a recent iSuppli report. On Wednesday, it unveiled its latest attempt to challenge it in the media player category, with the WD TV Live Plus HD.
Media players are set-top boxes that can pull digital content from a home network or the web and stream it to an attached TV and, in the case of Seagate and Western Digital’s devices, also serve up content from attached portable hard drives and USB sticks.
Seagate’s GoFlex TV was announced last month – the latest version of a media player previously known as the Free Agent Theater.
It is a slimmed down version and a streaming movie channel from the Netflix DVD subscription service has been added.
Now Western Digital has come out with its update to its TV HD player, also adding Netflix and matching other content channels with Seagate’s, such as Flickr and YouTube.
The company is differentiating itself with an improved Netflix interface – instead of having to use a PC and browser to set up a queue of content to watch on TV, users have wider access on the device to the Netflix instant-play library. This is similar to what is available on the Xbox 360 console, but slightly less sophisticated than the Roku box’s Netflix interface, which includes a search box.
This is such a small point of differentiation, but it shows how close media players are in their feature sets and how keen manufacturers are to get the slightest edge.
Other than that, the features are virtually the same, apart from Seagate’s device optionally integrating a GoFlex external drive inside the unit while the WD one relies on external drives being attached with a USB cable. Both units can handle a multitude of digital file formats.
Seagate appears to have the edge on price – at a recommended $130, it is $20 cheaper than the WD product. But then Best Buy is distributing $20 off coupons to its regular customers this week for the WD TV Live Plus.
Western Digital is currently number one in the market for media players, according to the NPD research firm. But, with such services being now integrated into TVs and Blu-ray players and a growing number of home servers storing media content, the future for the category is not bright.
