Our businesses cover a spread of broadly analogue to digital conversions, we have a CD ripping service focused on London clients, another CD ripping offering for more distant music lovers and a photo scanning service. We keep the web sites distinct for several reasons, but much of the behind the scenes technology overlaps. As time goes by the solutions for enjoying sound and vision are coming together. One word is emerging in this congruence - streaming.
Many of our clients are getting into volume issues. High quality slide scanning generate massive files and clients are asking us to scan thousands of slides. In the last month we've ripped CD collections for three clients each of whom had in excess of 500 CDs and another batch of scanned photos took up four DVDs, just under 15 Gb of jpgs. With a PC in the study, you in the living room, how do you access your photo albums?
In these volumes it simply isn't realistic to burn a collection of albums to DVD, then stack the DVDs next to the TV so you can access your images. A much better way, at reasonable cost, is to use a device to send (or stream) data files from your PC via your home network to your TV set. The leading device is this sector is probably Apple TV but there are many other units available including an excellent little box from Sony. They will stream photos, music and videos through your network. You can also access remote services, for example with Apple TV you can buy / hire movies from the iTunes Music Store, the Sony option allows access to a subscription based service Lovefilm here in the UK. In America Netflix is massively popular.
Economically the Apple TV box, at around £90, is highly cost effective. A tub of 50 DVDs in my local High Street can set you back anything from £16 to £30 so you don't have to avoid burning many DVDs to justify the box, and that's not allowing any value for your time. Additionally Apple TV will always stream the latest version of your file complete with any edits, which is better than having to re-burn DVDs.
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