SnapStream Blog

Yesterday, we launched microsites to sell Beyond TV and Beyond TV Link in Germany, France and the UK:

http://www.snapstream.de/ (Germany)
http://www.snapstream.fr/ (France)
http://uk.snapstream.com/ (UK)

We’re pretty excited to offer our products across the Atlantic as well as here in the States!

Our microsites and the products we’re offering in Europe are localized, so you can enjoy Beyond TV and Beyond TV Link in your native language. You can purchase products directly from these websites and pay in Euros or in British pounds, a special treat for those of you lavishing in the relative strength of the Euro compared with the dollar! Buy on the microsite, and the products will be electronically delivered to you.

We currently only offer technical support in English, though we’ve created forums for users in the UK, France and Germany. Our American users love the forums, because they can support each other and offer solutions to common issues with our products. We think and hope that the European community will embrace the forums as a means of supporting one another as well. It’s kind of like the European Union of technical support.

Our European product only has analog support right now. Our developers are hard at work on DVB-T/S support, because we know you want it, but it’s not quite ready to ship just yet. The great part is that if you buy Beyond TV or Beyond TV Link now, we’ll be sure to give you a free upgrade when we do add DVB-T/S support.

A special thanks to all the European beta testers who gave us feedback on the localization of the products and the websites. We couldn’t have created a product suited to our European consumers without your feedback. We are looking to expand our base of beta testers and our community in Europe, so if you are interested, check the microsites in the next couple of weeks for an opportunity to sign-up.

Chrissy Davis
Public Relations Coordinator

Beyond Media with Firefly PC Remote
We’ve been working on combining some of our products here at SnapStream Media to deliver a more complete media center experience for our consumers. I guess, in a way, we’ve been doing this for quite some time already by selling bundled solutions in our online store.

Now we’ve taken it a step further by including a PC remote with the Beyond Media retail package. I mean after all, our products were designed to be used in a living room setting, so why not provide a remote control to go along with them? What’s better is that it’s the Firefly PC Remote we decided to put in AND we’ve lowered the price for the combination! (Hey…perfect gift for Grads or Father’s Day!)

For the time being, you can still get Beyond Media on its own as a download in the SnapStream Online Store.

Medusa PVR
Ok, so I know the Medusa PVR, which was covered by PVRBlog, eHomeUpgrade and Engadget, is old news. BUT what you may not know is that we’ve started selling a do-it-yourself Medusa package in the SnapStream Online Store. There are actually two choices to choose from.

For those who are brand new to SnapStream, we offer a Medusa PVR bundle that comes with Beyond TV, three PVR-500 dual-tuner cards and enough TV tuner licenses to get you going. For you veteran SnapStreamers out there, who have been using Beyond TV since before it even became cool, we have a bundle for you with just the tuner cards and TV licenses, sans Beyond TV.

So get those little screwdrivers out and start opening your PCs, I see a fun BYO-Medusa project happening in your near future.

As of last week, we starting shipping the Diamond PVR-600 USB2 TV tuner in the SnapStream Store. We’re excited about this new TV tuner for a bunch of reasons. First, I’ll run you through the basic specs on the card — the Diamond PVR-600 is a USB2 analog TV tuner with an MPEG-2 hardware encoder. The MPEG-2 hardware encoder means you get high quality TV recordings without taxing your PCs processor (ie all the heavy lifting of encoding is done by the TV tuner, not the processor on your PC). But these things don’t set it apart from other USB2 hardware encode TV tuner cards. What sets the PVR-600 apart are two things:

1) It’s bus-powered: this means that the device doesn’t require a separate power adapter — it gets all the power it needs from its USB connection to your PC. This may not seem like a huge deal, but it does make the card a lot easier to install and use. Let’s face it — everyone’s powerstrips are already pretty crowded and to add another power connection can be annoying. It’s also one less point of failure — you don’t have to worry anymore about the power adapter getting unplugged.

2) It has a great form factor: The PVR-600 is nice and small — slightly larger than a deck of cards. This makes it easy to tuck away in your living room, behind your home theater PC. Or if it’s visible in your home theater system rack, it’s a pretty good looking, svelte piece of hardware.

And like other TV tuner cards that we sell in the SnapStream store, the PVR-600 has been thoroughly tested with Beyond TV so you can expect it to “just work” with your PC when you install it.

The PVR-600 is available bundled with SnapStream Beyond TV or standalone.