Sandisk Marches into Living Room with USBTV; Trial Test Coming

When we first heard from Sandisk about their new USBTV intuitive, first thing that came to our mind was like SanDisk making USB TV tuners? Turns out you can't exactly read into their product plan literally. Sandisk's USBTV is an ambitious project from memory card manufacturer to grab a piece of the ever growing digital media market. Their idea is in fact an ingenious way to deliver video from your computer to your living room's TV in a cost effective way via a USB thumbdrive. The dongle however actually combines plentiful of flash memory, a DRM-enabled video decoder and a video line-out. More after the jump.

Traditional media extenders such as Xbox 360 are great if you are geeky enough to know your ways around tweaking your network. USBTV, on the contrary is for the less tech-savvy type. Through old-fashioned method of copying files to the dongle and then connecting it to the TV output cradle, the Sandisk is an appeal to occasional users who don't usually mind reloading the dongle with a 2GB video during a weekly movie night at home. Granted, this may not sound like a ground-breaking product, but it appears to us that Sandisk goal is trying to reach critical mass with ease of use and low cost. We can already see its ease of use; it is also pretty obvious as the USBTV will never be sold as expensive as a $200 extender.

The video decoder is implemented in the dongle so if USBTV partners don't have much to worry about the extra hardware cost. A dedicated USBTV slot appears to be a standard USB connector outfitted with 2 extra pins for composite signal output. There's already a USB port on nearly every LCD TV on the market. We don't forsee any potential problems with this type of minor rewiring. And for the rest of us, there's always the cradle. Currently, LG, Mitsubishi, Philips, Pioneer and Zoran have joined the gang. We expect Sandisk to announce retail plans later the year as soon as it has the backing of these companies.

Sandisk will begin later this week picking people to test their new USBTV. The selected few will be rewarded with a free USBTV or basically the one you receive for testing. The trial is limited to a select group of people who will be picked from questionnaires submitted online. If you are interested, stay tune for further info.