Seagate Announces FreeAgent Theater

Seagate’s FreeAgent Theater joins a growing pile of options that allow users to access their photos, music, and movies on their TV. For people who don’t want a media center extender, which streams content from your PC to your TV, the FreeAgent Theater takes a different approach: it’s an external drive that plugs into a FreeAgent media player, which in turn plugs into your TV. The media player has a USB port, so you can attach a camera, camcorder, or another hard drive. The Theater will come in 250GB ($229) and 500GB ($299) capacities, and there will also be a media player–only option ($129), which is convenient for people who already own a FreeAgent Go portable hard drive or just want to connect their devices via USB. Is this setup clumsy or a low-tech relief? Depends on the user, we suppose. We can identify a few snags off the bat, though: it supports only the JPEG format for photos, and doesn’t work with Macs. Also, the TV must have component connections, S/PDIF, or S-Video; so, even though it can upscale movies to resolution as large as 1080i, there’s no  HDMI connectivity.