Las Vegas - Hyping over 50 new products released at CES, NETGEAR announced a $199 Internet TV box and a $399 digital entertainment center, joining an avalanche of over-the-top online video delivery announcements at CES.

The NETGEAR Internet TV player is a compact plug-and-go Internet set-top device with a simple remote control to enable digital TVs to be able to view Internet video, including YouTube, live Internet TV, popular Internet video websites, pay video-on-demand sites, and... you get the picture. The $199 device includes a  VTap video search capability for an "intelligent" search for Internet video, enabling geo-targeting, topic of interest, person, or popular websites. Consumers can play video, music, and photos from a local USB flash drive, or from NETGEAR's networked storage solutions.

On the higher end, squaring off against Cisco amid an ugly history of other companies failures, NETGEAR's Digital Entertainer Elite (Let's call it DEE) comes in at $399 and includes a 500GB hard drive. The video "jukebox" can play up to 1080p digital video, photos, MP3s and recorded TV shows from PCs or storage on the network, along with a diverse range of content, including Internet radio, Flickr, RSS feeds and online video.

Cool features of the DEE include an automatic search and order function that finds all digital media files on the home network and creates an easily accessible library for them, support for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, plus network attached storage, and a laundry list of supported video and audio formats and codecs. It's also got dual-band wireless onboard, so there's 2.4 and 5 GHz support.

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CES 2009: NETGEAR underlines service provider business - FierceTelecom [1]
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