Mainstream-priced Internet radio from Sanyo

This Internet radio, which will be appearing in the US market in 2009, is the first Internet radio / UPnP-AV (DLNA) compatible media player to be available from a mass-market brand at a price that appeals to the mass market. Most such sets are typically priced at a level that causes most consumers to think twice about buyint one and may not be available at retailers visited by most people.

 

I have also noticed that, especially in the Australian market, mauufacturers tend to place a steep premium on network or Internet functionality as far as consumer electronics is concerned. For example, I had noticed the Kodak EasyShare EX1011 WiFi-enabled digital picture frame (which can work with UPnP-AV media libraries) being sold for nearly AUD$400 where others that work from memory cards or thumbdrives only come in for under AUD$200. Then there isn’t much public awareness in the mass-market consumer-electronics retail channel about the idea of “pulling-up” media like audio files or digital images that are held on a home computer using devices that are connected to the same network used for gaining access to the Internet. 

 

What needs to happen is that more of the manufacturers that are well known to the mass-market need to sell network-enabled equipment at prices that appeal to most customers, especially by placing such equipment in the value-priced segment for the equipment type. They should also stick to having the equipment use UPnP AV / DLNA as the preferred network media-provisioning protocol so that customers don’t need to clutter their computers with many poorly-written network-media-provisioning programs that are awkward to run. This also takes the responsibility of writing a media-server program away from the equipment vendor thus allowing for cost-effective network-capable hardware.