There are unconfirmed reports emerging today that HP is about to cease production of their HP MediaSmart LCD TV range in favour of focusing efforts on their HP MediaSmart Connect extender.
This makes a lot of sense from a business point of view for HP - whilst I don’t know how profitable TVs are to manufacturer and sell, I see the price of them coming down every time I pop into my local big box retailers, so margins can’t be great.
If you can sell a small, easily transportable box for less than $300 that can give any flatscreen TV the same functionality as the MediaSmart TV, then my hunch is you’re going to move a lot more of those than $2000 TVs.
As for the HP MediaSmart Connect, two questions to HP;
- Isn’t it about time we had a firmware update? I certainly have at least 1 glitch in mine that needs fixing.
- What’s happening with regard to releasing the Connect outside the US?
More Info: HP MediaSmart TV
October 28th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
I thought about buying one of these last year, but had one very very hard time actually finding one for sale anywhere. That and it was way overpriced. Ended up not getting one.
October 28th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
I love Media Center Extender but this particular bundled LCD TV/Extender product wasn’t necessary. I think most people have been accustomed to buying their TVs, DVD Players, etc separately.
October 29th, 2008 at 10:24 am
I think the idea of consumers ‘buying their TVs, DVD Players, etc separately,’ are about to change for good because of the following reality components as we are moving towards:
- Consolidation and convergence society
- Environmentally friendly (save power)
- Form of control over how we spend our time
December 24th, 2008 at 3:34 am
I used to work for HP marketing, but got “laid off” when they killed off the TV division back in the summer. Their dirty little secret is that they released the Mediasmart Connect without any intention of ever updating it. It’s true! It was released stillborn and HP did not even tell the overseas programmers and factories that the project was cancelled. The few that made it out the door are all that will ever be made and there will never be any updates for them because microsoft makes it so hard to certify releases. Even the firmware it shipped with was months older than it should have been. Newer firmwares fixed many glitches but they cannot release them because Microsoft won’t allow it. The mediasmart connect is a piece of garbage. I would never buy another HP product.