The Flip camcorder has been very popular in the last few years, mainly because it so easy to shoot videos. However, watching HDTV has been very difficult when checking out your Flip footage. Flip (owned by Cisco) has created FlipShare TV, a three-piece media bridge to wirelessly transmit your footage from your PC or Mac to your HDTV – without a home network.
FlipShare TV jacks straight into your HDTV and then you just need to plugin your USB key which is pre-configured to connect wirelessly, creating a private Flip network. Once you’ve saved your Flip footage to your PC or Mac, you use the remote to access and watch it on your HDTV.
Currently costing $150 FlipShare TV it seems to be quite affordable and it solves a problem that a lot of Flip users all over the world already have.
Cisco Systems has announced today that its buying Norway’s Tandberg video communications business for $3 billion.
The deal should enhance Cisco’s own TelePresence business where it sells room-sized video conferencing systems that make you feel like you’re talking to people in the same room. These systems costs hundreds of thousands of dollars each but executives feel they can use them to save on travel costs. Tandberg is one of the chief rivals in the business and it makes specialized software for managing the conferencing systems and managing the connections between them.
This new deal is going to put a lot of pressure on Hewlett-Packard who have a very strong video conferencing business with their Halo product. In theory, video conferencing creates a lot of Internet traffic, which in turn helps Cisco’s core business of selling networking gear.
Cisco has bought 40 companies over the past five years, according to the New York Times. In the past week, merger mania has erupted, with Dell buying Perot Systems for $3.9 billion and Xerox buying ACS for $6.4 billion.
