With the rapid pace of technological advancement these days one thing that many electronics manufacturers lose sight of is the fact that advanced electronics for the sake of advanced electronics is useless- advanced electronics have to be useful to the people who use them. It seems that the makers of portable media devices have lost focus on this general principle of the usefulness of the devices they create. It seems that a lot of the portable media devices that come on the market these days are so souped up with obscure features that you really have to wonder whether or not it's any good for the things that it's supposed to be used for. For example, there's one device on the market that functions as a digital video recorder, can be used to surf the Internet over a wireless connection, can be converted into a camcorder with the addition of a digital camera or converted to a helmet cam with the addition of a special accessory, and will feed audio into a car's stereo system in addition to the normal things that a portable media device does. Another device uses a poorly designed operating system to swap files with other devices of the same model over wireless connections. While interesting, this feature isn't particularly useful and is a pain to use.
Now there's a portable media device on the market that not only uses high technology, but is also designed with ease of use and practicality in mind. In these two respects this device is unusual, but it also comes from a source that you wouldn't necessarily expect to provide consumer electronics. The marketer is the satellite TV provider Dish Network and the device is the PocketDish. The general concept of the PocketDish is that rather than get video by downloading it from the Internet, anyone who subscribes to Dish Network, has a Dish Network digital video recorder, and has a PocketDish can obtain video for the PocketDish simply by recording it on the Digital Video Recorder and then downloading it to the PocketDish.
This is an ingenious way to take advantage of the fact that Dish Network has access to so much video and has a number of benefits to both the owner of a PocketDish as well as Dish Network. The owner of the PocketDish benefits by having a straight forward and easy to use way of obtaining video. The video files are quick to download from the Digital Video Recorder, and unlike video files that are downloaded from online stores, this video is free since it's technically already been paid for through the Dish Network subscription.
PocketDish is a great benefit to Dish Network for a number of different reasons. The most obvious benefit is the revenue generated by sales of actual PocketDishes, but there are also some less obvious ones. For one thing, a PocketDish adds greater value to a Dish Network subscription and may make someone who's considering the purchase of a portable media device as well as a satellite TV subscription decide to go with Dish Network. It may also prompt existing Dish Network subscribers to upgrade their service by getting digital video recorders and or ordering larger programming packages so that they have more to watch both on their home TV sets as well as the PocketDish itself. All of these things mean that the PocketDish is a positive move for both Dish Network and its subscribers.
