Video Streaming, Sony Style

Back in March, I discussed Sony’s first-generation LF-PK1 LocationFree Player, a key competitor of Sling Media’s well-known Slingbox line (based on Texas Instruments DSPs, which is ironic because I wrote the March post while at the TI Developer Conference). In that writeup, I briefly mentioned Sony’s second-generation LocationFree line, which differ from the LF-PK1 in that in addition to supporting MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile video codecs, they can also stream in H.264 (aka MPEG-4 AVC, aka MPEG-4 Part 10).

The purpose of today’s follow-on writeup is to alert you that, per a post that came through my RSS reader yesterday, the second-generation LF-B10 LocationFree Player is now on sale for $79.96. Note that unlike its LF-B20 sibling (or, for that matter, its LF-PK1 predecessor), you can’t also use it as a generic 802.11 access point. However, if you want to be able to stream high-quality A/V content to a Windows PC, PlayStation Portable, (some) Sony Ericsson mobile phones, or a Mac OS X-based computer or Windows Mobile handheld (the latter two via third-party software), it’s an attractive option especially considering its original $199.99 MSRP.