NETGEAR Showcases a Fab Foursome of Home Networking Products
By Greg Robinson
For 15 years, NETGEAR has been a highly-respected name in the computer networking product category. Over the years you've undoubtedly come across their wireless routers, hubs, and multi-port switches - either when shopping for your home or business.
While NETGEAR has certainly dabbled in products geared towards home theater, the company's CES press conference last week was undeniable proof that NETGEAR is looking to firmly establish themselves as your go-to solution for bridging the gap between your home office and home theater.
On average, CES press conferences last approximately 45 minutes. During that time, maybe you'll hear about one upcoming product that truly gets you excited and makes you say, "I want that!" - two, if you're lucky. NETGEAR had four such products at this year's press conference.
First up was the 3DHD Wireless Home Theater Networking Kit. Here's the scenario: your family room now has a flat panel HDTV, a Blu-ray Disc player, and a gaming console - all of which require a high-speed internet connection if you want to make use of automatic software updates or streaming services such as Netflix. Some components feature integrated Wi-Fi, but many do not.
3DHD Wireless Home Theater Networking Kit
NETGEAR's 3DHD Wireless Home Theater Networking Kit acts as a wireless bridge, with a transmitter unit placed near your home's router and a receiver unit placed near your gear. The end result is a hard wire connection to your family room equipment, with no need to run Cat5 cable from your home office. And in an industry first, the WNHD3004 transmitter/receiver contains four radios and four antennas, allowing you to connect up to four Ethernet-equipped components in different rooms. To learn more, watch
NETGEAR's tutorial video.
Next up is NETGEAR's
NeoTV 550 Ultimate HD Media Player. In addition to Netflix streaming, the NeoTV 550 provides extensive connectivity options for viewing and streaming your own personal media.
NeoTV 550 Ultimate HD Media Player
On the front you get an SD card and USB port for easy connection to thumb drives and digital cameras. Out back you'll find a second USB port in addition to an eSATA port for fast data connection to an external hard drive. The NeoTV 550 can support 1080p HD video streaming and offers Dolby TrueHD decoding and DTS-HD Master Audio passthru. To learn more, watch
NETGEAR's tutorial video.
The NeoTV 550 is first and foremost a vehicle to view your content, so it only makes sense to have one central repository to house your precious photos, music, and videos. That's where NETGEAR's
ReadyNAS Ultra 2 Plus Home Media Server comes in.
This DLNA-certified media server features two internal bays with a maximum storage capacity of 4, count ‘em, 4 Terabytes. (That's a lot of cute kitten videos.) Other features include the ability to transcode and stream content to mobile devices using Orb plus the option of shifting media to remote DLNA -certified devices using Skifta. To learn more about the benefits of using a NAS, check out NETGEAR's
informative cartoon tutorial.
N600 Dual Band Gigabit Wi-Fi Router
Last but not least is NETGEAR's new
N600 Dual Band Gigabit Wi-Fi Router. At this point, wireless routers have become fairly commonplace and it's hard to get excited about a new one. That said, the N600 has a few new tricks up its sleeve. First off, thanks to its four Gigabit Ethernet ports, the N600 provides ultra-fast connections to local hard-wired devices. And wireless connections are no slouch either, thanks to NETGEAR's "Clear Channel" technology which automatically scans the Wi-Fi spectrum and finds the clearest channel to broadcast on.
Learn More:
Where to Buy:
The ReadyNAS Ultra 2 Plus Home Media Server
