Kaleidescape, the high-specification movie platform that provides an alternative to traditional streaming services and 4K Blu-ray players, has announced a more affordable piece of hardware that should ensure its services become much more accessible to home cinema enthusiasts.
Unlike companies such as Netflix and Disney+, which stream content to your living room on demand, Kaleidescape instead enables users to download a selection of thousands of movies and TV shows first, before watching it as if it were physical media, eliminating all of the glitches (such as buffering) that come with traditional streaming.
If that sounds great, it really is, but access to the service doesn’t come cheap. Until now, the only way to become a customer was to buy Kaleidescape’s premium Terra Prime Solid State Movie Server, which is probably the best movie system in the world, but comes at a terrifying cost of around £11,000 for the combination of server and media player.
The good news is that customers won’t have to shell out quite as much now, as Kaleidescape is shipping a more affordable alternative in the Strato V Movie Player, which costs less than a third of the price of the Terra system.
It’s a standalone device that can store approximately 10 4K reference-quality films on its internal solid-state drive. It also features a newer, streamlined UI, which has been refined to make it more suitable for the kind of smaller content libraries users will maintain on it. It notably supports both Dolby Vision HDR, and lossless audio in both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X to ensure a dramatic and immersive viewing experience.
Kaleidescape’s setups have traditionally been reserved for the rich and famous, but they can provide a nice solution for more modest home theaters, with their performance and design features that are quite unlike anything else. And they’re now much more accessible.
According to Kaleidescape, the Strato V comes with a gigabit ethernet connection that can download a high-quality, feature-length 4K movie in just 10 minutes, without any kind of performance degradation. Users can access thousands of 4K and HD movies and TV shows from its online store. They’ll have to pay for each download, of course, and there is the option to auto-delete each movie or show 48 hours after playback, so users won’t run out of space for more downloads.
The company said it has upgraded every signal for the Strato V to ensure higher quality and more robust playback.
The Strato V is on sale now with a recommended retail price of $3,995 in the U.S., which works out to around £3,100 in the U.K. Check out their website for more details.
