Copy Video From Your PC, and Then Watch It on Your TV
SanDisk's Sansa TakeTV is aimed at people who want to take digital video from their computers and watch it on their TVs, without getting too high-tech about it. — The heart of TakeTV is a U.S.B. flash drive that can store videos copied from your computer's hard drive.
Context & Ripple Effects
TakeTV arrives at the end of a year when the living room has been pulling video off the desk: the Times observed in May 2007 that external hard drives were shifting movie viewing from the PC to the couch, while the hobbyist routes to the same destination — bolting an eSATA drive onto a TiVo Series3 or hand-transferring TiVo recordings onto an iPod — demanded real technical patience.
SanDisk's move is the no-frills mass-market version of that trick: a USB flash drive that doubles as a TV playback stick, shipping just months after SanDisk's confirmed June 2007 DivX licensing agreement gave its devices DivX playback out of the box. The target is the viewer who never opens a settings menu — the same mainstream audience ReplayTV chased when it reoriented its DVR business around the PC in December 2005.
First-order effects
- Non-technical buyers get a zero-setup bridge from PC to TV — copy files onto the drive, dock it beside the television — sidestepping the home-network configuration that TiVo-style recording setups demand.
- The June 2007 DivX license pays off on day one: TakeTV plays back a format much downloaded video already arrives in, sparing owners a transcoding step.
Second-order effects
- A simpler PC-to-TV path pressures DVR-centric players like ReplayTV, which staked its 2005 relaunch on PC-based recording, to compete on ease of use rather than recording hardware.
- Flash makers gain a living-room use case that moves high-capacity USB drives beyond cameras and music players, widening the retail market SanDisk sells into.
Third-order effects
- If the sneakernet model scales, PC-to-TV video hardens into two rival camps — networked set-top boxes versus portable-storage bridges — pushing content owners toward per-device format licensing rather than per-pipe distribution deals.
- Format licensors such as DivX become de facto gatekeepers of TV compatibility, with device certification displacing the cable box as the checkpoint between a downloaded file and the screen.
The trend: Consumer video is migrating from the desk to the living room along two competing rails — home networking and removable storage — and whichever demands less setup wins the mainstream household.