In the electronics industry getting the edge on the competition can be the key to everything. Apple's iPod is a great example of this. When people think about MP3 players, and more recently portable video players, the iPod is what comes to mind. The success of th iPod is a fragile thing though because it's built mainly on a combination of the facts that the iPod was the first MP3 player to really get attention and that it's made by a trendy company like Apple computer.
The fact that the iPod's success is built on such a fragile premise means that anything could upset that success, and other portable video device manufacturers have been trying. There's one new comer to the market though that has an excellent chance of stealing Apple's dominance of the market and this new comer is coming from an unlikely place: Dish Network.
Dish Network is a satellite television provider, but it's recently decided to take a foray into the portable video device market with its line of PocketDish portable video devices. Unlike Apple and its competitors Dish Network has a tangible advantage over other portable video devices that comes from how it gets its video. While most portable video devices display video that's been downloaded from the Internet, PocketDishes display video that's been downloaded from Dish Network Digital Video Recorders.
While this may not sound like a significant difference, the implications to the average users of portable video devices can be staggering. For one thing, mainstream TV shows and movies that require you to pay a fee before you download them from the Internet. With the PocketDishes you just need a subscription to dish network and the necessary hardware, and beyond that the video is free. Considering that there's a good chance that many people have subscriptions to Dish Network and Digital Video Recorders anyway, the PocketDish is the only additional cost, and it costs about as much as any other portable video device. Another major advantage is that anyone who has a PocketDish and a Dish Network subscription can download almost all of the programming they'd watch at home. This isn't always the case with on line video stores which can be hit and miss when it comes to the programming that they have.
The two more advanced models in the PocketDish line have another advantage over the competition because they have another unusual way to acquire video. They have digital video recorders built into them. That means that both of these two models can record video from a variety of devices that can play it. Unfortunately, it requires the source of the video to play it in real time, in other words it needs one minute of recording time to record every minute of video. They offset this disadvantage somewhat with their ability to store video acquired this way in MPEG-4 data compression format. MPEG-4 data compression technology allows the thirty gigabyte model to store up to one hundred and twenty hours of video and the forty gigabyte model to store up to one hundred and sixty hours of video.
All of these extra features make the PocketDish line big contenders in the portable video device market.
