4. Personal or Portable Media?

There are plenty of solutions for getting downloaded video and music onto your TV, from Windows Media Center to digital media adapters-and of course, Apple TV. You can record TV on a Windows Media Center and transfer it to a portable media player, or buy the TV programs from the iTunes Store. You can stream music around the house with a Squeezebox or a Sonos system, or see content from your PC on your TV using the Media Center interface with an Xbox or a Media Center Extender from suppliers like Linksys and D-LINK. But if you don’t want to go the Media Center route, there hasn’t been another way to do all of that with one device-until Archos brought out the TV+.

Only Windows Media Center matches the range of features in the Archos TV+.

Archos fans will have spotted that the TV+ takes the Wi-Fi-connected Archos 605 player and the PVR adapter, and combines them into a neat white box that sits under your TV; it saves you from having to leave your PMP at home to record TV that you want to watch on the go. New users will appreciate that the TV+ is far easier to set up than most media extenders. But there are some things you might expect from a media streaming system that the TV+ just doesn’t do.

It makes some sense not to include a tuner that would tie the TV+ to a single service or country, and would also increase the price for users who’d find it irrelevant or redundant. But missing out on HD is more problematic. Archos argues that it wants to reach the mass market: users who don’t have HD TV services, or fast enough broadband to download HD content. Compressing large HD files down to watch on the small screen of a handheld media player is a waste of bandwidth and processing power-and it would need far more than the 250 GB hard drive in the TV+. It would also annoy the studios whose films Archos wants to resell on its content portal. So that makes sense if you view the TV+ as a way of recording broadcast TV to watch on a portable player while you’re out and about. But it doesn’t make as much sense if you want to treat the TV+ as a true PVR, or use it for streaming all your content around the house; the Apple TV and Xbox 360 both offer HD, as does Media Center. There’s no Mac support either: you need Windows and Windows Media Player to stream content to the TV+.

Archos fans will like (or at least recognize) the TV+ interface; it’s certainly simple, but it also looks a little dated. That’s true of the TV+ in general. So there are certainly drawbacks, but the features are easy to use. And even after you factor in the cost of the plug-ins you can’t get the same combination of recording, streaming and browsing for the price anywhere else.