Sponsored Post The Times have recently reviewed a new IP TV streamer – The Veebeam – which has just been made available in the UK. Simply plug in the USB dongle to your computer to beam its content to your telly. It works with Windows 7, Vista, XP plus Mac OSX and It’s designed to send anything on your computer to your TV wirelessly, including things like the BBC iPlayer and YouTube.
2011 is really shaping up to be the year that IPTV hits the mainstream. More and more families want to stream 4OD, the ITV Player and many other services to their biggest screen in the house, rather than watching on their smallest. The US is already seeing a significant proportion of the population cancel their Satellite and Cable service and instead opt to just pay for the series they are really interested in via iTunes for example.
One of the most interesting features of the Veebeam is its ability to send say a movie from your laptop to your TV, whilst still allowing you to continue to work on your laptop, browsing, emailing or whatever.
The £139 little black box supports full 1080p HD content for crisp colourful images and its optical output allows you to transmit 5.1 digital surround sound too. If you’re happy with SD content then there’s a Veebeam at £99 for you too.
So how does the system work in the real world, well, according to the Times review – “you can’t beat the Veebeam for sleek simplicity and user-friendliness”. Check out the link below to Amazon to buy the Veebeam and let us know what you think in the comments.
It looks like it has two modes of operation:
1. Transmits your desktop wirelessly, to save having to run a monitor cable from your PC to the TV (if indeed you’ve got a suitable monitor port)
2. “Play To” mode which sounds like it acts like a UPnP/DLNA Renderer, so you can stream a media file to it. The WD TV Live box does this and is around £50 cheaper and has lots of built-in online content widgets too (Youtube etc), but it can’t act as a wireless monitor cable in addition.
And…
3. Audiocasting – This just streams the audio through to the TV. The image of the computer screen does not get transferred; all you will see is a black screen, so just audio of your computer will get played through the TV.