Article – French language / Langue Française
Freebox Révolution : InfoMusic et DNLA dans une mise à jour | Numerama.fr
From the horse’s mouth
Free.fr
Press Release (French language / Langue Française – PDF)
My Comments
Freebox Révolution now with Shazam-style abilities
Often when you are watching TV, you may hear that piece of music that was used in that movie or TV show even though it may not be visibly identified.
Normally you could use Shazam or SoundHound on your smartphone or tablet (iOS, Android, Windows 8) to identify the songs but you have to “cock” your device to your TV’s speaker and have Shazam running before you know when that song is to play. Here, it can be difficult if you are watching broadcast TV content in real time rather than from a user-controlled recording like a PVR, optical disc or streamed on-demand service.
In France, the country where the set-top box is not the ordinary set-top box and the pay-TV and Internet service is delivered highly competitively, Free.fr have integrated this function as part of a software upgrade for their Freebox Révolution set-top box. Here, the software version number is 1.2.11 to gain this functionality.
This software, like Sony’s TrackID Android app is powered by GraceNote music-recognition technology and works from any of the video sources passing through the Freebox Révolution Player set-top box. This includes content available on the home network.
For that matter, Free has even improved the DLNA abilities for this software by having the Freebox Révolution Player be a DLNA MediaRenderer. This means that, like with the Sony BDP-S390 Blu-Ray player, you can “push” image, audio and video content to this device using software like TwonkyBeam, Gizmoot or BubbleUPnP to appear on your TV.
This is another example of what the competitive telecommunications and Internet market in France is bringing about in a healthy manner.
