Seagate 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.
Thanks 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).
And 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!
Access to on-demand content just got a better if you own a 
Seagate
The web-based interface for your DockStar is full of simple and powerful capabilities. It works on PC’s, Mac’s, and even on Linux systems. I have used it with Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. And it’s the same on each and every one of them. The browser interface gives you access to thumbnails of images, including the ability to scrape and present the first frame of supported video files. It allows you to generate a web-browser-based slideshow of all images located in the folder. It lets you play music files from the shared folder right there in your web browser. And it even lets you stream video content in your browser window (provided the file type is supported, and there is sufficient bandwidth on both ends to stream the content faster than playback speed).