Western Digital WD TV HD Media Player

December 10, 2008 – WD® (NYSE: WDC), the world’s leader in external storage solutions, today introduced a simple way for consumers to play their stored digital content on their HDTV in Full-HD 1080p resolution.

The WD TV™ Media Player connects to a user’s TV or home theater and plays digital movies, music and photos from WD’s My Passport™ portable drive or other USB mass storage device. The WD TV Media Player is available now at select retailers.

According to research firm IDC, nearly 334 million GB of photos and more than 3.1 billion GB of video will be stored on consumer desktop and laptop computers in 2008. The research firm expects that to increase to 400 million GB and 5.8 billion GB, respectively, by 2010.
These large personal digital libraries are all but trapped on users’ computers. In order to play
their content on their TV, consumers have struggled with clumsy solutions such as copying onto multiple CDs and DVDs or connecting their PCs to their TV via wires or complicated home
networking solutions. The WD TV HD Media Player enables consumers to easily and elegantly
access their high-definition content on the biggest screen in the home.

Users leave the WD TV HD Media Player connected to their TVs and simply plug in up to two
My Passport USB drives or other USB mass storage devices loaded with HD media. Using the
included remote control, they can navigate and play their content with the media player’s high-definition on-screen menu. With My Passport drives now available in 500 GB capacities, users
can build large collections on multiple drives, all playable by WD TV.

Navigating content on USB drives is fast and easy with WD TV HD Media Player’s remote
control and on-screen menu. Content can be viewed either by filename or thumbnails of photos,
album covers or movie cover art. In addition, automatic media aggregation lets the viewer see all
their media by media type in one menu regardless of its location in folders or drives.

“As leaders in external storage, we have become the trusted brand for storing and backing up
large media collections for consumers around the world,” said Jim Welsh, senior vice president
and general manager for WD’s Branded Products and Consumer Electronics Groups. “Our
best-selling My Passport portable drives help customers carry their media library with them
anywhere but until now, there has been no easy, affordable way to access and play all that
content in their living rooms. The WD TV HD Media Player effectively unlocks all that content
from the storage device and lets people enjoy it on their biggest screen and best sound system.”

To find out more about the WD TV, continue reading our review!

To discuss about this review, head over to the forum thread!