WD TV Live Media Streamer Skips Internal Storage For Spotify

Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy. After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater,... ? Learn More

Western Digital is getting a lot of mileage out of their WD TV media players, and that trend continues today with the announcement of their new WD TV Live box. Unlike its big brother, the WD TV Live is strictly a streamer, but it has a reason to boast: it’s the first WD product to ship with Spotify support

The WD TV Live doesn’t have any internal storage to speak of, but it does sport 2 USB ports for all of you who carry thumb drives full of illicit TV shows.

Once it’s set up on a wireless network or an ethernet connection, the WD TV Live can access media from computers on your home network, or from content partners like Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Pandora. It’s got enough horsepower to playback video content at 1080p, and supports a boatload of media formats from the mundane (like AVIs) to the more obscure (hello MKV!).

Ardent Spotify fans need not worry about missing out here. The WD TV Live supports a majority of Spotify features, like managing playlists, sharing songs, and subscribing to friends and fellow music lovers with good taste.

With companies like Microsoft looking to own the living room with their new media initiatives, it makes it harder and harder for boxes like the WD TV Live to pick up any steam. Still, its price point is sure to help: at $99, the WD TV Live is an inexpensive way to start streaming with minimal headaches. It’s set to appear in Western Digital’s online store shortly, and it shouldn’t be long before it hits your electronics retailer of choice.

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A First For Home Shopping Network: Selling An Online Storage Product. Guess Which One!

Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... ? Learn More

Exclusive - Starting today, Home Shopping Network will begin selling – for the first time – an online storage product on air. With a reach of about 89 million households per week in the United States, this could be quite a big deal for the online storage provider in question.

So who is it? Dropbox? Box.net? Mozy? Carbonite?

No Sir Ree Bob, it’s MiMedia (earlier coverage)!

Sure, HSN has sold electronics before, but this is actually the first time they’re selling an online file storage service on the air, so consider this a sign that this type of product is going mainstream.

MiMedia tells me Home Shopping Network had a number of parameters they needed to adhere to, namely: a ‘lifetime’ service that costs no more than $50.

Also, the product needed to be tangible and shippable. Wait, what?

Yes, it’s kind of ridiculous to sell a 100% digital service as a physical product, but HSN knows its audience very well, so MiMedia complied with everything they asked.

What they came up with is an offering that comprises 25 GB of storage, ‘for life’, which will be sold for $49.95. To achieve a shippable product, MiMedia will be sending buyers a USB drive with a software loader pre-installed. Yes, still kind of ridiculous, but who knows, it might just work for them.

MiMedia brings you a totally new approach to online storage – a way to protect, access, enjoy and share your digital life all in one place. MiMedia will back up and protect your files in a secure online storage account. Beyond online backup, MiMedia also provides instant on demand access to your files from anywhere. With MiMedia, you can listen to your music, watch your latest videos, view any of your photo galleries, and access your other files all in...

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Aiming To Be The Dropbox Of Music, Mecanto Launches An Affordable Streaming And Storage Service

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If you’re a fan of cloud-based music lockers, it’s a good time to be alive. Back in March, Amazon somewhat surprisingly beat Apple and Google to the music streaming and storage punch with their “Cloud Drive” and “Cloud Player”. Both Google and Apple have since launched cloud music offerings (or betas thereof), and all three continue to improve and evolve as time marches on.

As a music fan, it’s great to see cloud music storage and streaming services moving forward in tandem, even if we all have to admit to having our own personal favorite. Because, frankly, the more competition in this space, the better. Which is why you should be paying attention to a new startup that’s entering stage left: Mecanto. Yes, today, a new cloudy music service enters the arena, promising unlimited music streaming and storage to listeners all over the world — that won’t put a dent in your wallet. (Mecanto is offering TC readers 1,000 free 6-month subscriptions. Huzzah! See below for more info.)

Tel Aviv-based Mecanto is hitting the scene this week with a cloud-enabled music-player and storage service that is easy to set up and features all the things a user wants from their trusty neighborhood music locker: Unlimited storage and streaming, the ability to automatically sync your iTunes library and PC folders with your online account (from multiple PCs), global availability, playlist editing, video, easy browsing, and cross-platform functionality. Also doesn’t hurt that users can find Mecanto on the Web, or go mobile on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Symbian.

The MeCanto mobile interface is pretty nifty and offers users the ability to easily listen to songs and albums, or create playlists. Songs stream over 3G or WiFi, and users can listen to any song they want without having to worry about how much space the song takes up on their phone. Here’s to you, cloud.

It’s sounds like a great start, right? Sure, but with names like Amazon, Google, Apple, Spotify and umpteen others staring them down, Mecanto definitely has an uphill climb ahead. That being said, right now affordability is a strong selling point for the Israeli music service. Take a look at its competitors: Spotify Unlimited and Premium cost $60 a year and $120 a year, respectively, iCloud comes in at about $25 a year, Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Cloud Player cost at least $20 a year (and unlimited storage may be a limited-time offering).

Google, on the other hand is currently free, but there’s little likelihood that it will stay that way for long. In comparison, at $20 a year, Mecanto is an appealing alternative to the big players, especially as it offers worldwide availability, cross-platform integration, and instant uploads — a suite which its competitors only offer in pieces.

Furthermore, first time Mecanto users get a free month-long trial of the service, at the end of which they can pay $20 for the whole year or split it up at a $2 monthly rate. To begin using, users only have to download a small application to their desktops, which will then upload and sync all of your music automatically. Bada bing, bada boom. The best part: Mecanto’s upload process is accelerated, which means that users can access their music almost instantly, even before the upload is finished. Listeners can access their music right away, or they can choose to upload their files at a slower pace, saving bandwidth without having to worry about delays.

Not wanting to be antisocial in the Age of Facebook, the music service also offers social features, including the ability to add YouTube videos to one’s account and playlists as well as the ability to share those YouTube clips on Facebook and Twitter, Last.fm scrobbling of tracks, sharing current tracks to social networks, multi-desktop sync, and smart categorization of tracks. As to file support? Mecanto works with MP3, M4A, WMA, OGG, FLAC, and most of their derivations.

Mecanto’s so-called “three screens and a cloud” platform really is a great alternative to the big names in the space, and a “Dropbox for music” isn’t an unfair analogy. Sure, it’s design isn’t quite up to par with some of the others, but its affordability, worldwide availability, and cross-platform functionality may just give Mecanto the legs it needs to be taken seriously in a space crowded with familiar names.

So far, the startup has raised $2 million in funding from private angels, but you can be sure the startup will be seeking more cash as it begins to scale and rolls out worldwide.

The Israeli music locker is definitely worth a look, especially under the auspices of a free month-long trial and the fact that the first 1,000 TechCrunch readers that click here will receive free six-month-long trials of the service. I mean, who doesn’t like a music deal? Check it out.

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IBM Assembles Record 120-Petabyte Storage Array

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IBM Research has just set a world record in data storage by building a drive array capable of holding 120 petabytes. It was done at the request of an unnamed research group that needs this unprecedented amount of space for running simulations of some sort. These simulations have been expanding in size as the datasets grow, but also as more backups, snapshots, and redundancies are added.

How did they do it? Well, the easy part was plugging in the 200,000 individual hard drives that make up the array. The racks are extra-dense with units, and need water cooling, but beyond that the hardware is fairly straightforward.

The problems come when you start having to actually index this space. Some filesystems have trouble with single files above 4 GB or so, and some can’t handle single drives larger than around 3 TB. This is because they just weren’t designed to be able to track so many files over so large a space. Imagine if your job was to name everyone in the world a different name — it’s easy at first, but after a billion or so you start running out of permutations. It’s the same way with file systems, though modern ones are much more forward-looking in their design, and I doubt you’ll have that problem again — unless you’re IBM Research.

120 petabytes of storage is an insane amount, eight times larger than the 15 PB arrays already out there, and they already had to deal with address space issues. In IBM’s huge array, tracking the location and calling data for its files takes up fully 2 PB of its own space. You’d need a next-generation file index just to index the index!

Their homegrown file system is called General Parallel File System, or GPFS. It’s designed with huge volumes and massive parallelism in mind: think RAID for thousands of drives. Files are striped across as many drives as they need to be, reducing or eliminating read and write capacity as a bottleneck for performance. And boy does it perform: IBM recently set another record, indexing 10 billion files in 43 minutes. The previous record? 1 billion files — in three hours. So yeah, it scales pretty well.

The array, built by IBM’s Storage Systems team at Almaden, will be used by the nameless client as part of a simulation of “real-world phenomena.” That implies the natural sciences, but it could be anything from subatomic particles to planetary simulations. These projects are generally taken on as much to advance the field as to provide a service, though. And of course now IBM gets to boast that it built this thing, at least until an even bigger one comes along.

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