Western Digital (http://www.westerndigital.com) has introduced the WD TV Live Hub media center, a Full-HD 1080p media player with a 1TB built-in network hard drive that gives users the freedom to play all their personal media on any screen in the home.
The WD TV Live Hub media center brings new experiences to the WD TV family, including instantly renting or purchasing the newest releases through the Blockbuster On Demand service, the same day as DVD/Blu-ray release, as well as interacting with personal Facebook communities. In the U.S., the WD TV Live Hub media center is initially available exclusively at Best Buy online and at all 1,093 Best Buy stores nationwide.
The WD TV Live Hub media center plays a variety of media file types, including Full-HD 1080p video formats such as .mkv, .mp4 and .mov. The compact hard drive enables users to centralize their digital media from multiple sources.
Digital media can be easily transferred to the internal drive from shared folders on Macs and PCs on the network or directly from external hard drives, thumb drives, camcorders or cameras connected via one of the two USB ports. Users also can stream videos from home network drives with a DLNA/UPnP server such as the recently announced My Book Live home network drive.
The WD TV Live Hub media center also is a media server. HD video, music and photos can be streamed from the onboard hard drive to any DLNA/UPnP-compatible TV or multimedia device, anywhere in the connected home, including the WD TV Live Plus HD media player, connected TVs, Blu-ray Disc players, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 game consoles. Users also can stream content from their WD TV Live Hub media center to iPads, iPhones or Android smartphones using third-party applications.
The WD TV Live Hub media center offers Facebook integration, which lets users upload photos and videos, share their status, view their wall and get the latest newsfeed from their network of friends -- all on the big screen TV. In addition, the WD TV Live Hub media center provides viewing of Netflix for movie streaming, YouTube for user-generated videos and Flickr for photo sharing, as well as listening to Pandora, a personalized Internet radio service. Additional content includes local and international weather forecasts from AccuWeather.com, and MediaFly daily video podcasts from CNN, NBC, MTV and ESPN.
The customizable WD TV Live Hub media center's user interface enables personalization of screen backgrounds and user interface themes, as well as setting of favorites and content ratings. Standard wired or wireless USB keyboards can be used for text input for activities such as searches of local content and YouTube and Facebook interaction.
