Announced at CES 2008 last year with a much-ballyhooed press conference co-starring Oscar-winner Michael Douglas, XStreamHD ("extreme high-definition," get it?) promises to be a revolutionary content delivery service with an emphasis on quality. The service, combined with their hardware, enables movie streaming over satellite in glorious 1080p, paired with lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 sound.
The service was supposed to launch in October 2008 but the year ended with no XStreamHD in place. In Las Vegas for CES 2009, the company had an enormous booth and lots of details about their technology, which in fact goes beyond simple streaming to offer whole-home movies, TV programs, music, photos, even videogames and a high-quality phone service. The system includes a media server for content storage (we can rent or own a given title), offering multiple streams out to different locations throughout the home. XStreamHD also works with DLNA-compliant devices like the Sony PlayStation 3.
Because of the enormous size of the files, we are asked to pre-select movies we might want to watch, which then download in the background (similar to VUDU's 1080p HDX offerings), making possible an instant playback experience. Their CES showing has indeed been impressive these past two years, and while I won't say that it all sounds a little too good to be true, very soon I'm going to want to stop discussing and start watching XStreamHD to decide for myself.
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