Personal media management and consumption are a mess. For instance, I use Picasa for photos and short video clips coming off my camera onto my laptop. But given the large number of photos and video, I then move everything to an EasyNAS RAID array. Pictures from my mobile phone go to flickr. For music and video downloads I use iTunes on my laptop, but in my living room I have a Sonos. My PVR is from the cable company and (big surprise) doesn’t talk to anything else. My DVDs are largely not ripped, so the only access for these is by actually finding the physical disk. And I am sure I am leaving a lot of stuff out, simply because I can’t think of it right now which suggests that I don’t have any clue where those assets wound up.
When it comes to trying to access all this media from our beautiful new TV screen things are even worse. I skipped the media center PC route (with its too-many-buttons-to-count remote) and instead went for an AppleTV. Getting pictures from the NAS onto the AppleTV is possible, but fairly excruciating as it involves an extra server, iPhoto and iTunes. Once stuff is set up it works ok, but it doesn’t handle short video clips which I take almost as often as still images. It is possible to stream video from a server running iTunes to the AppleTV, but the process is even more involved and error prone than for pictures.
So what do I want? I want something that puts me in control of all my media wherever it may reside. And I want that something to have a standard browser interface, an iPhone interface and a TV interface that can be operated using the iPhone (or an iPod Touch) as a remote. Ideally, the something would consist of a very small “agent” download that can run somewhere on my home network and discover all my media assets. The rest of the service would live in the cloud.
