Archive for Content provider

Updates From FrameChannel!

It’s been awhile since our last update. In the past few months there have been lots of updates and new channels added to FrameChannel.

Updates

Now Playing – Ever see a headline on your screen and want to read the whole article? Now, if you sign into your FrameChannel account and click on the Now Playing tab, you can will see a list of your channels that have associated stories. For text based channels such as People, BBC, Time, RSS feeds, etc. you can now click through to the full story on the source’s website!

My Account – We’ve streamlined the registration process and the My Account page. Some of the information that was once in My Account (your account’s RSS address, PIN and device settings) is now located on the settings page. You can access these by clicking on the green Advanced button on the top left.

New channels – We’ve been very busy adding lots of new content! A few of our new channels are listed below. To see them all, go onto FrameChannel and check it out!

• Deutsche Welle – 16 new international news and sports channels

• Lottery – Lottery results for the US and Canada

• Better Homes and Gardens “Better Blog” – Content from the magazine’s popular blog

• Sports headlines – 11 new channels covering major league and college sports

• College Football and Basketball – Scores and standings for US college teams

• Hockey – Scores and standings for NHL teams

• High School Sports (US) – Get your local high school’s sports schedule and results

• Entertainment Weekly – Get EW’s daily picks for music, TV, movies, and more

• Facebook® Birthdays – Never miss a friend’s birthday again with birthday updates

• Memeo Share – Share your photos from Memeo

• Digg – View the daily Diggs in 8 categories, from business Diggs, to Gaming Diggs and much more

• US House of Representatives – Search for your local representative and subscribe to their Twitter feed. Don’t know your Rep? Choose the Local category then the US House of Representatives sub category and browse through the listings!

WIth all these changes and additions, we’re sure some of you will have questions and feedback. We want to know what you think! Contact us via our helpdesk with any questions or comments!

Follow us on twitter! We add a new channel everyday that we announce on Twitter. Come check it out to know when we add new channels!

Thank you for using FrameChannel!

Sincerely,

The FrameChannel team

D-Link ships DIR-685 all in one router

We’ve posted here several times about the new FrameChannel-compatible D-Link DIR -685, and now Slippery Brick informs us that this fantastic product has shipped!

The DIR-685 was first introduced way back in January at CES and now the company has began shipping them. The DIR-685 features a built-in draft N Wi-Fi module that allows it to communicate with network attached storage devices.

But that isn’t all it does. That 3.2 inch LCD screen will play streaming video or you can use it as a digital photo frame. If you like stats, it will display status information in graphs and gauges too. Like weather, but don’t have any windows to look outside? You can program the screen to display weather forecasts and other live internet content. This router does a lot.

The NAS feature supports UPnP server functions and BitTorrent downloads. Pick up the D-Link Xtreme N DIR-685 $300.

Thinking Screen Adds iCal Support to FrameChannel, Bringing Timely Calendar Content to Internet Connected Screens

Marketwire has the scoop about Thinking Screen Media’s latest !

EW.com Is First to Provide iCal Content With Updates on Major TV, Music, and Movie Events

WELLESLEY, MA–(Marketwire – October 1, 2009) – Thinking Screen Media (www.thinkingscreen.com — formerly FrameMedia Inc.), the company that is defining the content experience for screens in the Connected Home, today announced that it now supports iCal-formatted calendar- and event-based content on FrameChannel (www.framechannel.com). Entertainment Weekly’s EW.com, the first content provider to participate, has launched several iCal-driven channels on FrameChannel, through which users can view details on the hottest upcoming TV, music, and movie events.

“We are always looking for new ways to share our content, and FrameChannel is a great example of that,” said Cyndi Stivers, Managing Editor of EW.com. “Those who subscribe to our iCal content for FrameChannel will get EW editors’ picks for the best in pop culture every day of the week.”

FrameChannel is a Web services platform that allows users to browse online and select from more than 1,000 content channels, configured for delivery on media players, connected TVs, digital photo frames, video game consoles, Internet radios, telephones and other information appliances. The FrameChannel platform is featured on dozens of devices in the market today from top brands such as Kodak, Motorola, Samsung, Toshiba and many more. Users can combine their personal content (photos, tweets, messages, and favorite RSS feeds) with commercial content such as news, weather, sports, financial and local information.

“We are experts at configuring a wide range of digital content formats for an optimal viewing experience on connected screens,” said Jennifer Sagalyn, VP, Content Partnerships for Thinking Screen Media. “As millions of connected screens hit the market, FrameChannel becomes the perfect service for combining all your photos, social media and information channels, providing a constant stream of personalized information at a glance. iCal support is an ideal addition, giving users access to calendar-based appointments and events from any ical formatted feed.”

Content providers interested in featuring their content on FrameChannel should go to http://www.thinkingscreen.com/content_partners.html. Consumer electronics manufacturers interested in customizing, co-branding, and integrating FrameChannel with their devices should go to http://www.thinkingscreen.com/hardware_partners.html.

About Thinking Screen Media, Inc. (www.thinkingscreen.com)

Thinking Screen Media is a leader in delivering content to “the 4th screen,” a new category of Connected Screens that includes WiFi photo frames, connected TVs, media players, set-top boxes and more. Its free FrameChannel service (www.framechannel.com) can be customized for any screen, and is today available on a growing number of products by top brands such as Kodak, Samsung, Toshiba, Motorola, ViewSonic and D-Link. FrameChannel users can easily select their favorite local, national, social networking, or photo sharing content from more than 1000 channels, and program their devices to feature that content. FrameChannel intelligently streams real-time content from the selected channels, so users can always view the very latest information as they move through their connected home.

DreamScreen VS. Toshiba: FrameChannel Wins!

David Pogue, of the New York Times, has written an article comparing HP’s DreamScreen with Toshiba’s DMF82XKU and DMF102XKU. Guess which one comes out smelling like a rose?

. . . a case study of two companies’ approaches to the same problem.

In this corner, the DreamScreen from Hewlett-Packard. It’s available in 10- and 13-inch versions for $250 and $300. In that corner, Toshiba’s less attractively named DMF82XKU (8 inches, $180) and DMF102XKU (10 inches, $230). Each can play music, display photos and present widgets — radio, scores, headlines and other Web goodies — wirelessly grabbed from the Internet.

Both are sleek wide-screen displays with a one-inch margin of glossy black; the Toshiba, with its fine transparent acrylic border, looks slightly classier. Each comes with a tiny, cheap plastic remote control whose buttons require considerable force, but you can also summon hidden illuminated touch controls by tapping on either frame. They come in handy when you lose the remote.

Each frame is meant to sit on a desk, but the H.P. can also hang on a wall.

You can load up either frame with photos, videos and unprotected music files by inserting a memory card, a U.S.B. flash drive or a U.S.B. cable connected to a Mac or PC.

Photos look terrific; both frames easily fulfill the primary mission of a digital photo frame, gracefully changing the image once every few seconds, every few hours or every day. (You can even rotate the Toshiba 90 degrees; the image rotates to match.)

But that’s where the similarities end.

Toshiba’s frame lets you subscribe to any of 1,000 widgets at Framechannel.com. It’s a fantastic variety: BBC. Facebook updates. Twitter posts. Favorite sports teams. Concert info. Cartoons. Trivia. Horoscopes. Local traffic. Channel after channel of gorgeous photography. Both the Toshiba frame and the Framechannel.com site, where you load it up, are challenging to figure out. (Incidentally, many other companies sell Framechannel-enabled frames, but the new Toshiba is a good representative of the genre.)

The Toshiba’s software design over all, in fact, is somewhat baffling. It consists of simple lists of text commands, but at least it’s quick and efficient.

The DreamScreen from H.P., on the other hand, has a lush, colorful, icon-driven software design. The company thinks it’s really onto something; a public relations person calls it “a breakthrough new platform.”

Well, that might be pushing it.

The widgets are far more limited than the Toshiba’s; each represents an individual deal made by H.P. (as opposed to Framechannel’s public-bazaar approach). They include Clock, Facebook, Weather and, for Web photos, Snapfish. (Snapfish? Not Flickr?) You can’t add any new ones, although H.P. says that it will, through software updates.

Some of them are handy — especially the Pandora radio widget, which tailors its music selections according to your tastes (you rate each song as it plays). The clock options are beautiful: analog or digital, clock with photo, clock with calendar, clock with foreign-city time and so on.

Others are less impressive. The Calendar, for example, shows a handsome month-view — with nothing on it, and no way to add anything to it. Guess it’s useful if you want to know what day of the week the 23rd falls on.

The speakers are stereo and sound better and richer than the Toshiba’s. The H.P. has a slot on top for the remote; the Toshiba does not. There’s a jack for a wired network, which the Toshiba lacks.

Unfortunately, in terms of polish and design finesse, the DreamScreen might better be called the NightmareScreen.

Over and over again, the software gets in your way. You can’t hear the different alarm sounds as you scroll through them. There’s no indication on the frame that the alarm has been set. The audio and video get out of sync during the frame’s tutorial videos.

On options screens, like the one where you set up your clock, the settings appear in a tall column. If you want to adjust only one of them — Clock Style, the first option — you would think that pressing O.K. on the remote would mean “I’m finished, take me back.” But no. You have to walk all the way down the screen, using the remote’s arrow buttons, past all of the other options, to highlight the O.K. button on the screen, and then press the O.K. button on the remote to “click” that. It’s exhausting.

There’s a dedicated Slideshow button on the remote, so that when a guest drops by, you can get those pictures flowing with one button press, no matter what you’re doing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work if what you were doing is the Calendar, the Settings screen, the Clock, and certain other random places.

Meanwhile, there’s no Home button. You either have to hit Back-Back-Back, or stumble upon the tip, in the tutorial videos, that pressing-and-holding the Back button takes you Home. H.P. agrees, in retrospect, that a button for the most frequently visited screen might have been useful.

My favorite bug: you can choose Internet radio stations either by nation of origin or by genre. But the two lists have gotten mixed up in the software. So your choices of music genre are Algeria, Alternative, Ambient, American Samoa and so on.

The frame is dog slow, too. Ten seconds to start up the Clock. Eleven seconds to open Settings. Five seconds every time you want to change widgets, which requires going to the Home screen.

(“We’ve learned that we’ve taxed the processor too much,” says the product manager, Ameerd Karim. He says the company is readying a software patch that may help.)

According to the company, those big, bright, elegant onscreen graphics are what bogs the thing down. Frames like the Toshiba, with its straight-ahead, boring all-text menus, don’t have the speed problem.

But in the end, I finally realized what bugged me most about the DreamScreen. You’re standing directly in front of a beautiful glass screen with a Home screen, inch-tall icons, and finger-size buttons — and then you’re supposed to operate it all using a remote six inches away? It just feels wrong.

H.P. won’t confirm or deny it, but I’ll bet a hundred bucks that the DreamScreen was originally intended to have a touch screen. That theory would also explain those bizarre software designs, like having to walk down a screen full of options to reach the O.K. button. In the touch-screen conception, of course, you’d just tap O.K. with your finger, one step instead of seven.

Somewhere along the line — maybe when the economy crashed? — I’ll bet those plans got shelved to keep the price down. But if the DreamScreen truly is a “platform,” as H.P. says, then maybe there’s hope yet for the Touch DreamScreen.

So there it is: a study in contrasts. One frame where almost no thought was put into the software design, resulting in an infinitely flexible, crude but less expensive machine. And another frame where, in fact, the software design was overthought — resulting in a more limited, sluggish machine with glitches.

Maybe someone should get those two sets of designers together for coffee someday. Yeah — coffee and widgets.