“Netgear announces the death of local media storage,” says a press release for the Silicon Valley networking company’s latest products.
So is this something we should mourn, condemn as premature or ask what the heck it is talking about?
Netgear’s bold claim is that PC hard drives are no longer required to store music, photos and video and the way to go is network-attached storage (NAS) – a box linked to the home router that can contain one or more high-capacity hard drives, enabling content to be stored centrally and streamed around the house and beyond.
It would like us to choose its new ReadyNAS Ultra family of storage systems. But, at $600 and $900 for two empty boxes – the Ultra 4 and Ultra 6 respectively – it seems a stretch that consumers will adopt this solution en masse.
To be fair, Netgear says they are aimed at “prosumers” – power users wanting the latest gear – and two 2-terabyte hard disks are provided for an Ultra 4 version at $900 and 3 x 2Tb disks for the Ultra 6 at $1,350.
But, while I agree with the concept, it will have to become easier to comprehend and cheaper before users give up USB keys, portable drives and the practice of streaming media content from the internet or from their PCs to devices around the house.
At a launch event in San Francisco on Thursday evening, Patrick Lo, chief executive, told me Netgear did appeal to ordinary consumers with its Stora storage device, which contains a 1Tb drive and sells for around $180.
“We always take the high ground and then we continue to work the price down,” he said of the new flagship products.
The ReadyNAS Ultras do include some software and capabilities that it would be nice to see in cheaper versions.
They have TiVo compatibility that allows shows, music and photos to be stored on the hard disks and streamed to any TiVo digital video recorder in the house. Memeo is supplying backup software. Orb software enables transcoding of video to different formats so it can be streamed in browsers and on mobile devices. Skifta offers media shifting so users can access their content not only on their own home networks but on the home networks of friends.
For families wanting to share terabytes of media with one another and route it to any device in the home (as well as access it remotely), networked-attached storage boxes or media servers plugged into the home router will probably be the best way to go in the future.
Netgear is not killing the competition, but it is making that shift easier.
