While all the plaudits for introducing internet connectivity to TV sets has gone to Sony and Samsung for activities which they have primarily staged in the US, Panasonic Europe showed it is not being left behind with product introductions that it is making in Europe this week.
Panasonic is the world’s largest supplier of Plasma panel TV sets, but is now also shipping a fair selection of LCD TV screens and this week added three new series of TV devices, all of which come equipped with the Viera Cast online video service which it launched in Europe last June.
The content for Viera Cast is slowly but surely rising, and it now supplies
online versions of all major sporting events covered by Eurosport, as well as YouTube, Google’s Picasa, Bloomberg financial news, local weather channels and channels from the German ARD Television group, an organization made up of Germany’s regional public-service broadcasters.
The Eurosport offering includes 1,200 sport videos supported by English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Russian voiceovers.
It’s not a massively strong line up to be sure, but the sudden arrival of German specific content implies that Pansonic will be arranging more regional exclusives for its TV owners around Europe. Eurosport is very comprehensive and has a high viewership, but it doesn’t carry many of the big live sporting events. We’re not quite sure if the Viera Cast systems allows to you navigate freely around the internet looking for video, but we don’t think so, at least not yet.
These services will now all be available free on the new Panasonic line-up of NeoPDP flat screens ‘ Z1 Series, V10 Series, and G15 series ‘ as well as two full-HD LCD series ‘ V10 Series and G15 Series.
But Panasonic is also responding to the fastest growing TV phenomena in Europe, the UK’s Freesat service, and is helping the device eco-system for free to air satellite services by adding a DMR-BS850 which is both a HD DVR with a Blu-ray home cinema system. The DVR has a 500GB hard-drive, a Blu-ray recorder as well as two Freesat tuners, for full HD recording.
It also comes with the Viera Cast system, and an SD card reader for instantly viewing video from a camcorder. There’s also a USB port, for loading footage from a memory stick, and you can then burn content directly to a Blu-ray disc.
Panasonic originally delivered its Viera Cast system on its high-end plasma TVs but is gradually bringing it down to smaller devices.
Unlike the integrated Widget driven systems which works with the AOL widgets in the US, this internet video relies on thumbing through the remote for finding viewing options ‘ a bit cumbersome really, but then again it is only a first generation product, although it does have its own Ethernet socket going straight to the TV so that video doesn’t have to go via a PC.