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Complete Home Entertainment Ecosystem! From Seagate? YES!

Seagate_FA_TheaterPlus leftremoteSeagate Technology – the hard drive company that has been around for 30 years – actually has a complete set of products that can enable a home entertainment system that is beyond your imagination!

By using a Seagate BlackArmor NAS product (a 440/420, 220 or 110), or even a Seagate FreeAgent DockStar USB network dock, you can host all your content – pictures, music, videos and movies – and have it available to your Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ that is attached to your big screen television!

I’ve done this in my home, as well as my brother’s. Networked storage – even networked storage that is simple to setup and accessible outside the home and shareable – serving up all your content to your televisions, each TV enabled with its own Theater+. And for that content that you want tighter control over (not available to everyone on the network), simply put that content on a FreeAgent Go and slide it into the FreeAgent Theater+ when you want to enjoy it.

BA NAS440Thanks to the USB ports on the Theater+, you don’t even need a network to get this capability. You could simply take all your rich media content on your PC, put it on either a FreeAgent Go or any other USB storage device, and connect that directly to your Theater+ to bring it back to life.

With this simple setup, you can have: slideshows of all your digital pictures, complete with elegant transitions and music playing in the background; all your home movies off your camcorders, presented in easy to access menus for simple viewing; your entire music library available to you throughout the home, wherever you have placed a FreeAgent Theater+; all the movies and video content that you may have accumulated from whatever sources you have, complete with full menuing support for content that has it (like your ripped DVDs).

And the costs?  Well, it’s not thousands of dollars, as you might expect. No professional installers are needed. Each FreeAgent Theater+ will set you back $149.99 – you will want one for each television. A FreeAgent DockStar (where you use your own storage, but it is networked) lists for $99.99. If you wanted to move up to a BlackArmor NAS, they start at roughly $200 for a 1TB network attached storage system, complete with media streaming capability.

So….  A simple apartment setup could be as inexpensive as $250 (one Theater+ and one DockStar). A larger system – say a 3 television home – would be between $550 and $650 (depending on whether you go with a DockStar or a BlackArmor NAS 110).

DockStarAnd you can always add more storage. Sure, the costs will start going up, but adding storage to DockStar is as simple as plugging in standard USB drives, such as our FreeAgent Go, or FreeAgent Desk.

And all this is brought to you by Seagate – 30 years of quality and reliability for all your storage need!

How simple is that? Give it a try! Or ask me how you can do it yourself!

Have you seen YouTube on Seagate FreeAgent Theater+? Firmware update enables it!

Seagate_FA_TheaterPlus leftremoteLast week, Seagate released a firmware update for its recently release Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ product that provides access to YouTube – and it’s been approved by YouTube!

There are many other improvements in the product through this firmware update, like improved alphabetic sorting.

But there are also some other fascinating features – RSS video feeds from places like CNN and HD channels and text RSS feeds from the likes of CBS, CNN and NPR.
On top of that, UPnP has been added, so that the Theater+ now easily sees any media servers that are located on your network, making access just that much easier.

With these additions, FreeAgent Theater+ takes on new strength in your home entertainment center. Use Theater+ to access all your pictures and music, whether located on your FreeAgent Go (or other USB attached storage device) or on your networked media server. Enjoy the latest YouTube videos in the comfort and social atmosphere of your family room. And get the latest news, information and entertainment from your favorite RSS video feeds.

And if you have a Seagate FreeAgent DockStar, you can even access the rich media content located on the attached storage devices through your network on your Theater+. Keep it all in one place, attached to your DockStar, for access from outside the home, sharing capabilities, and now enjoyment on your television with Theater+!

Simple. Easy. Connected with the now available FreeAgent Theater+ Wireless Adapter.

Your complete home entertainment solution. For all your rich media content. All brought to you by Seagate.

New O’Neill Video on Seagate FreeAgent Go for Mac

There’s a great new video out today about the importance of hard drive storage in the creative process. Marc Prefontaine, a Staff Photographer from O’Neill Surf, discusses all the many uses and needs he has for the Seagate FreeAgent family of products, specifically for the Mac.

Marc does a lot of photo shoots for O’Neill, and he has to protect the content that he shoots while still in the field, as well as make sure that he has backups of all his content libraries when he is in the office. Amazingly, Marc actually travels with 4 FreeAgent Go for Mac disk drives in his bag when he travels. He loves them for their reliability, capacity, and high speed Firewire 800 interface.  He keeps multiple copies right off the camera, and then makes additional copies when he returns to the office.

Marc knows from experience the value of the content he has on his Seagate FreeAgent hard drives, and he knows that he will need to have access to this content for a long time, whether he uses the images today or not. You never know when you will need something. So by having so many copies in the places he needs them, Marc is certain to always have access to the images he needs.

Marc carries as much capacity as he can with his FreeAgent Gos (models come in capacities as high as 1TB). He has even more capacity sitting on his desktop, with the FreeAgent line of desktop products that come in capacities as high as 2TB. And then with networked multi-drive products in the BlackArmor NAS line, we deliver capacities as high as 8TB.

Digital photography and video work require increasing amounts of storage space. Here at Seagate we take great pride in providing leading capacities with the quality and reliability that people like Marc depend on to store, protect and secure all the things that are so important to his livelihood.

NetFlix for PS3

Access to on-demand content just got a better if you own a PS3.  Sonyand Netflix just announced a deal to include Netflix streaming capability on the existing install base of PS3 consoles. Combining recent price cuts with Netflix functionality for free, it looks like Sony is taking off the gloves against Microsoft. While Xbox 360 users also have access to Netflix content, you have to be an Xbox Gold user which costs an additional fifty bucks a year.
One bonus of Netflix on an Xbox or a PS3 is that streaming quality can be enhanced by buffering content to the hard drive and not being totally at the mercy of your broad band connection. As the Netflix catalog of on-line content grows, I can see the benefits to owning a PS3 getting better and better…

PSNetflixAccess to on-demand content just got a better if you own a PS3.  Sony and Netflix just announced a deal to include Netflix streaming capability on the existing install base of PS3 consoles. Combining recent price cuts with Netflix functionality for free, it looks like Sony is taking off the gloves against Microsoft. While Xbox 360 users also have access to Netflix content, you have to be an Xbox Gold user which costs an additional fifty bucks a year.

One bonus of Netflix on an Xbox or a PS3 is that streaming quality can be enhanced by buffering content to the hard drive and not being totally at the mercy of your broad band connection. As the Netflix catalog of on-line content grows, I can see the benefits to owning a PS3 getting better and better…