Flip videos on TV through Cisco Router
Bangalore: Cisco Systems, which acquired the Flip products in March, has unveiled FlipShare TV - a set of products that helps people transfer their videos from a Flip camera to a PC and then to a television. But users have to pay $150 (excluding the HDMI cable) for a product that deals only in Flip videos. The router can't pull down videos from other services like YouTube or hop onto your wireless network to play videos from your PC, according to The New York Times.
The FlipShare TV has three parts. First, there's basically a small router that connects to a TV via composite cables (the red, white and yellow ones) or an HDMI cable for better quality. Then, there's a USB stick that plugs into a home computer. Finally, there's a remote control.
This set-up becomes more interesting through the addition of Flip Channels. These are basically free Web sites that host collections of videos. You can set up the FlipShare TV system to grab videos from certain channels.
The Flip cameras owe their popularity, in large part, to their no-frills design. Similarly, the FlipShare TV and Flip Channels try to save people from complexity and from themselves. Users don't need to configure a wireless network or go hunting around the Web for videos.
The Cisco FlipShare routers, on the other hand, eat up another electrical outlet and cable port on the TV. Cisco also wants customers to use up a USB port on their PCs. Another drawback to the FlipShare TV is that the quality of the original video is reduced so that it can travel around the Web more easily. "The file you bring down is about half the size of the original we sent up," said Simon Fleming-Wood, the Head of Marketing for Cisco's Consumer Business Group. "But when you bring it to the TV, it still looks really good."
Drawbacks aside, the FlipShare TV product does fit in with the simplicity mantra that has been the hallmark of the Flip phenomenon. Along with the new hardware, the FlipShare software received some fine-tuning. Flip owners can now upload videos to Facebook with the click of a button, just like they've been able to do with YouTube. There's also a FlipShare mobile app for playing videos on the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices.
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