DivX (DIVX), a San Diego, Calif.-based online video technology company is expanding its reach into the living room. Today, the company showed off Connected, its media-extender platform that uses chips from Sigma Design (SIGM) and is able to pull various different types of multimedia content from a PC connected to the home network. The Connected box was code-named GejBox.
DivX co-founder Jérôme “Gej” Rota told NewTeeVee that this is a device meant to act as an extender for content on your PC. He said that the company has no intention of manufacturing or selling the device. Instead, the platform, which tries to mimic the Apple TV platform (both in functionality and aesthetics), will be licensed to device makers in Asia.
Currently device makers such as Netgear (NTGR), Linksys (CSCO), D-Link, and Buffalo Tech make media extenders. Microsoft is also an active participant in the “media extender” market. The presence of many players hasn’t brought down the prices, and DivX is hoping to change that. White box makers based in, say, China can help drive down the prices of these extender devices to a point where they can become really cheap.
DivX is making a major push on its Connected platform, and today it acquired the assets of Veatros, a Lawrence, Kan.-based company.
Veatros’s technology was designed to conduct real-time digital video processing and will be used by DivX primarily for the purposes of producing enhanced video search and discovery services. Veatros was spun out of the Information and Telecommunication Technology Center at the University of Kansas.
The Connected platform is open enough for developers to create their own plug-ins, that are essentially channels. The devices can pull down videos from DivX Stage6 video-sharing service. The software inside the box includes a browser based on the Gecko engine, making it easy to view web pages and other web content such as maps. It doesn’t have an internal hard drive and connects to home networks on both wired and wireless connections.
I’ve had one for a couple of months as a beta tester. It’s pretty cool.
Since I have an AppleTV and a modded xbox running XBMC and I’m part of this DivX beta, I’ve noticed how DivX has differentiated this extender. I believe their intention is to get this DivX client chip embedded in other devices, like DVD players and set top boxes. Since the heavy lifting is done on a server running the DivX software, the cost to have the client should be pretty low. Even if it’s released as a standalone media extender, it should be pretty cheap (fingers crossed). Another nice thing is it supports the Xvid format, which I used to need to re-encode to MP4 to play on my AppleTV, but now I just use this DivX beta box and see it over HDMI on my plasma 🙂