Never one to shy away from new sources of content, media, entertainment what have you, I was pleased to get an invite into SyncTV’s beta program. Haven’t heard of SyncTV? I wasn’t overly familiar with it myself but it didn’t take long to grab my interest. In the weeks since installing the software I believe I’ve caught a glimpse of the future and its one where physical and digitally distributed media can happily coexist.
I suppose a more formal introduction is in order as we’re discussing a yet to be launched product. SyncTV 
grew out of the advanced research labs of Pioneer Electronics but according to President John Gildred, it soon became apparent the service was larger than any one platform and or parent company for that matter, and to grow into its full potential SyncTV would need to be its own entity.
In my perusing of Sync’s documentation and corporate philosophy I noticed repeated mention of their open platform standard. They really seem to be pushing this aspect to other consumer electronics manufacturers in hopes of broadening SyncTV’s reach to other segments of the market. Another example of this open platform mindset is the fact that even in beta stage SyncTV is already available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, which to my knowledge marks the first time a premium video download service has been available on all three platforms (at least at launch).
SyncTV’s subscriptions are per channel, show or season and a new series subscription gives you retroactive access to older episodes (at least in beta), so as you can see flexibility is the name of the game here. This is great for someone like me who may really love a specific show on oh say, Showtime (Dexter) but doesn’t necessarily want to pay for the entire channel. The entire season of Dexter comes out to less than two months of a Showtime subscription, so with a season lasting 12'ish weeks it just might be a viable alternative to a full channel subscription.
This is an extended entry - Continue reading 'Review: SyncTV (beta)'...
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