Kaleidescape Mini - A nice new option, still no downloads
Tuesday, March 3, 2009 at 09:52AM 
I'm excited and a little sad about Kaleidescapes new server. OTOH, Kaleidescape makes the most wonderful movie server player around. Having a library of DVD's accessible throughout a home is just incredible for most of my customers. I don't have any customers that dislike the Kaleidescape - for most it's their favorite product.
Before the mini, the minimum configuration of the Kaleidescape was around $14,000. Now for $7,995 you can get 3 zone server (1 video, 2 audio) with a player/reader. It's only expandable to 1.5TB of storage - that's it's main limitation. Enough for a fairly decent music collecton and a set of recent movies but not a huge movie library.
What excites me is that this puts Kaleidescape as an option for many, many systems. Kaleidescape can now fit, fairly easily, into the $50K-$75K system where before it took a vast % of the budget.
What makes me a little sad is the continuing lack of online content or content importing. We have customers who like to purchase via iTunes (you can do it, but it's a pain) or shoot movies in HD (can't do it) or rent HD movies online (can't do it).