Wi-Fi Enabled Stereo From Philips In Beta

Orangerobot writes "Philips Electronics is undergoing the beta test for the latest model in the Streamium line called the MC-i250. You have to trudge through a cheesy Flash presentation to get all the details, but it looks pretty good: Wi-Fi, CDDB support, online playlist management and more. It looks like they might actually get it right." Reader UVWarning's review of the current generation of Streamium indicates plenty of ways the next generation could improve on the current one.

Comments

article text (the phillips site was acting /.'d

[trelanexiph]

Philips Streamium MC-i250, the world's first Wireless Broadband Internet Micro Hi-Fi System.

The MC-i250 builds on the highly interactive audio features of its predecessor. Only this time, it's wireless. Effortless access to a whole universe of music in any room in your home, within your home network - without wires, without boundaries.

Product highlights

It is as unlimited as your imagination.
Create and explore your very own universe of music:

Personalized Internet Audio:
Pick'n'mix from a vast catalogue of artists, music styles and eras to create a personalized station playing your favorite music.
Online Music Charts:
Enjoy the best of your favorite music styles with dedicated online charts - all updated daily.
Online Radio:
Go global! select from thousands of stations of music, news, sports and special interests in any language, from every region.
INFO! Service:
Press the INFO! button to receive an email with detailed information on artists and tracks.

Virtually unlimited
-Wireless connection to your home network
To be well and truly connected, wireless is the way to go. You can virtually stream digital music, access award-winning online music services and your PC's music files - from any room in the house.

All this is made possible with the uniquely powerful concept of Wi-Fi - wireless fidelity.

(Wi-Fi, also known as 802.11b, is the international leading industry standard for wireless broadband networking.)

The missing link - PC Link
PC Link wirelessly connects you - and your family - to not just 1 PC but all the PCs connected to your home network - at the touch of a button. And you can savor your vast collection of music through Philips' patented wOOx speakers for unmatched, deep and dynamic bass sounds.

Get personal - My.Philips
Created exclusively for Streamium users, My.Philips.com lets you log on to access and manage your vast online music collection, get special links to premium partners, download latest software updates, check out news and information, or even make purchases.

This extended online product interface lets you venture where you want to go, while maintaining control right at your fingertips.

Here, now, always - Futureproof
The upgradeable Streamium MC-i250 is a secure investment. Get the latest scoop on online upgrades and stay up to speed with changing technology, new products and services. As a proud Streamium owner, you become part of a privileged league once you register with My.Philips. If it's hot and happening, here and now, you will be the first to get it...always.

Ex-stream-ly feature-packed Audio System
The Streamium MC-i250 offers multi-format CD playback and a full-function FM/AM tuner. Powerful (2x50 Watts) wOOx speakers ensure mighty, impressive sound.

Built with brains - and brawn - this amazing set can handle both MP3 and mp3PRO compression formats. Its 5-line display shows artist, track title and time elapsed. A user-friendly jog dial scrolls quickly and accurately through stations and tracks. Top technology right at your fingertips!

Want to know more about MC-i250?
Full details are just a click away...

Limited music stations

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

If this thing is limited to certain internet music stations like its predecessor, you can write it off without thinking twice.

They are playing right into my lap...

[Max Romantschuk]

My WLAN enabled home media server plan is getting hotter by the minute... bwahahaaa!

No, but seriously, this is really the solution which makes sense... Why do you have to physically put a disc into your stereo to listen to something? It should be enough to buy the rights to listening (CD or not), have it on a media server of your own or stream right off the net.

Think of the possibilities for internet radio stations and indie artists if every home stereo could do stuff like that... yay! :)

Re:They are playing right into my lap...

[Max Romantschuk]

Their servers would die because of the overload

Not necessarily. Unless I'm misinformed IP broadcasting enables streaming to multiple recipients using one TCP-feed. And solutions like PeerCast are creating yet another option.

Re:They are playing right into my lap...

[squaretorus]

Danger Danger. I might buy a licence to listen to my new Coldplay album this week and assume its a licence FOREVER. But - the bastards go bust and shut down the service 3 years from now to replace it with a SUBSCRIPTION service - now I have to pay a $20 initial purchase plus $5 annual subscripiton for that album.

No. I wan't some media! In my hand - that plays on generic hardware. No more. No less.

Re:They are playing right into my lap...

[daBass]

IP broadcasting can be done, especialy when IPv6 arrives but even then the carriers will want more money than broadcasters have. On the internet, both sending and recieving party pay.

Peercast will die the fate of popular P2P networks. Hailed as "the more users the better it works", the reality is: "too many users and it dies becasue non of these users have enough bandwidth to be hub". I have seen 10Mbit connections die because a PC was a Kazaa host. Kazaa saw it had a lot of bandwidth and made it a master. Ofcourse IT infrastructure shut this PC down.

Either that or the horizon will be too close and many stations are out of range, just like cool FM station in the other town.

Re:They are playing right into my lap...

[Max Romantschuk]

Peercast will die the fate of popular P2P networks. Hailed as "the more users the better it works", the reality is: "too many users and it dies becasue non of these users have enough bandwidth to be hub". I have seen 10Mbit connections die because a PC was a Kazaa host. Kazaa saw it had a lot of bandwidth and made it a master. Ofcourse IT infrastructure shut this PC down.

A carefully designed P2P protocol will not necessarily suffer this fate. If I remember correctly the PeerCast protocol is designed to avoid this by rerouting streams when a link gets saturated.

Generally speaking design can greatly affect a P2P network. I'm not surprised that Kazaa would have a problem like this, but don't forget that even DNS and Usenet are in a very real sense P2P applications. P2P doesn't mean that an application has to be completely disstributed (like gnutella) or centralized (like napster). P2P is about having autonomous nodes accomplishing a task together. Protocol design is the key to harnessing all that power lying around.

Re:As a concerned American patriot,

[trelanexiph]

I look at this as someone who's been directly involved in bringing ogg/vorbis to both streaming mediums, and hardware players. Put quite simply if you want ogg vorbis support to pirate music you might as well stick with mp3pro, or mp3. Roughly (if not less than) .5% of music on the P2P networks is in Ogg Vorbis format, and quite frankly we're happy to see it that way. So how can Ogg Vorbis be supporting piracy, if none of the pirates are using Ogg Vorbis?

hp's new Digital Media Reciever is similar

[Rkane]

hp has a Digital Media Reciever that sits on a wifi network and scans the network for shared folders with music, AND pictures. Then, it plugs into a stereo/tv using s-video and rca cables. It seems to me that this whole phillips stereo is just another version of the same things you can already do with a computer and the hp DMR.

For the record, I do acknowledge that the DMR is SERIOUSLY lacking in that it can't do video. When they support DivX, I'm all for it.

Re:That's not the point!

[turnstyle]

Here's what I do:

I have an old PC ("the server") that has my music collection and is wired to my stereo, and wired to my LAN.

I mostly work on a wi-fi laptop.

I use remote desktop software to control what's playing on the server. That way, no matter where I am, I can control what's on the stereo, using any audio source available to the server (whether it's my software or services like Rhapsody or other Web sites or Internet radio).

You can use pretty much any remote software, such as WinXP's Remote Desktop or PCAnywhere or VNC (I have some notes about that here).

Next, you could also make that same server-based collection available for playback over your LAN -- and even out over the Internet (if you have enough upstream bandwidth).

Andromeda lets you do that, provided you're running a Web server that can do PHP or ASP.

That all might sound complicated, but it's not, and it's really convenient.

My 2c, -Scott

Re:gracenote CDDB - bleh

[pherris]

If it can be changed to use FreeDB instead of CDDB I'd be pretty happy.

Don't bet on it. To use CDDB one must agree not to support any other similar systems like FreeDB.

From "Why freedb.org" at freedb.org:

As Escient has changed the terms of licence for accessing CDDB, some programmers complained that the new licence includes certain terms that threatens them in a way they cannot accept: If you want to access CDDB, you are not allowed to access any other CDDB-like database (this one, for example) ...

Besides from what I've read in the past Philip's net radios require some hacking to get them to work with personal streaming servers. Changing anything past the volume seems to be controlled by Philips. It's too bad since I suspect they could sell a lot more if people could modify the onboard software.