blockbuster-2wire-mediapoint-set-top-box

There are so many movie-streaming companies out there but of all people, you would have thought that Blockbuster would have had the jump on the streaming digital-movie market but it looks like the marketing and strategy guys went walk-about for a while. Blockbuster have finally decided to make a belated entrance to the market with the announcement of their MediaPoint movie set-top box, handily built by 2Wire.

Now, with the likes of Roku, Vudu and NetFlix to compete with to name but a few, it looks like Blockbuster have an uphill battle to fight if they are going to grab a piece of the movie-streaming pie but you forget one thing – they have the ultimate opt-in list. They already have millions of people who already visit their stores to rent movies, all they need to do is set up a few in-store demo’s and the Blockbuster 2Wire MediaPoint set-top box could be flying off the shelves. They may have been late in the game but Blockbuster could be on to a quick winner in the movie-streaming stakes.

At $99 is relatively cheap as these things go and strictly speaking the price is for the 25 movies you get for free when you first purchase the Blockbuster MediaPoint (or conversely, the MediaPoint is free when you take out an advanced rental of 25 first-run movies, TV shows etc. for $99, whatever). After that it cost $1.99 a movie and with a HDMI port it’s likely that streaming HD movies are on the horizon.

Spec wise the Blockbuster MediaPoint set-top box comes with a couple of USB ports an SD slot and streams over Ethernet and WiFi. Not the most technically advanced set-top box out there but it will get the job done.

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