More Details On Kaleidescape Blu Ray Pricing Emerges…Oh Boy…

If you don’t know who Kaleidescape is (and odds are if you are reading this blogs you don’t own a Kaleidescape system lol), they make high end media distribution systems for homes. This includes servers which rip/store your Movie Collection and players to play back your collection streamed from the server. A few months ago they added support for Blu Ray, but there is a catch. To help avoid any legal issues the user will be required to have the physical disc in some sort of movie carousel. Well, it appears that Kaleidescape has released some more information on this carousel. As detailed on Electronic House, there will be two models. The first model, the Modular Disc Vault, will hold up to 100 Blu Ray discs and must be connected via USB to an M300 player. The second model, Integrated Disc Vault, will hold up to 300 Blu Ray discs. It will have a player built in, and will connect to the Kaleidescape system via Ethernet. I have obviously left out one very important fact, price. The Modular Disc Vault is expected to retail for $1,500 (plus you are required to either already own or purchase a M300 separately for another $2,495). The Integrated Disc Vault does not have a set price yet, but has been stated that it will go for somewhere under $6,000!

So let’s say you wanted to have a basic setup, where you wanted to be able to play back your Blu Ray library in two rooms of your house. Just going with the “bare minimum” you would require 2 x M300, a Modular Disc Vault, and a Kaleidescape server (the entry level server is the 1U, but I don’t know if that would be enough to hold 100 Blu Ray discs). Doing some quick math the cost comes out to a whopping $16,400 ($2,495 x 2 for the M300, $1,500 for the Module Disc Vault, and approx $10,000 for the 1U server). You read correctly, $16,400, and this is just for the “minimal” configuration.

For all the pain, complaining, alpha/beta testing, etc… us geeks experience when trying to set up our own home media distribution system, there is a sense of satisfaction knowing that we are doing for a fraction of the cost what Kaleidescape is doing. Going through a quick calculation of my setup at home, I can stream all my videos (approx 400 combination of Blu Ray and SD DVD), music, photos, etc… to 5 rooms in my house, all for easily less then $3,000, and it is possible to easily come in under that figure. I just thought it would be interesting to put things in perspective 🙂 Then again, Kaleidescape also targets customers with Jets and Yacht, so I guess until I win the lotto I will just stick with my method!!!

Oh yeah, here is a thought, if the Modular and Integrated Disc Vaults are in fact just disc vaults (i.e. Kaleidescape simply does a periodic check to ensure that a physical copy of each Blu Ray disc ripped on the server exists in the vault), then why in the hell do they cost so much???? It is not like the physical disc is actually being accessed/played, but I guess keeping prices reasonable could undermine the whole Kaleidescape system!

Kaleidescape adds Blu-Ray Support (Sort of)

One of the criticisms of Kaleidescape, the maker of high end (read expensive) whole house digital video distribution, is the lack of Blu Ray support. Well, it appears that you can cross this off the list of To Do’s, as Kaleidescape has finally added support with the addition of the M300 and M500 player. For a description of what the M300 does:

The M300 Player is based on Kaleidescape’s M-Class architecture, a powerful platform for the onscreen user interface and for playing Blu-ray content. Blu-ray movies are played in high definition video with lossless audio, including support for 1080p video with 24 frames per second and bitstream pass-through of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio. With full access to the exclusive Kaleidescape Movie Guide, the small footprint of the M300 is ideal for locations where import and direct playback of physical discs are not required, such as a child’s room or a stateroom on a yacht.

An M300 Player can play the copy of a Blu-ray Disc, DVD or CD stored on your server. For Blu-ray, playback must be enabled by the presence of the physical disc in one of your M500 Players.

You will notice I placed in bold an interesting point. It appears that in order to play back a Blu Ray movie, the physical disc has to be in one of the M500 players. Am I missing something here, doesn’t this completely defeat the purpose of Kaleidescape. If I am required to have the physical disc installed, then I might as well just buy a dedicated Blu Ray player and go old school (yes, put the disc in when I want to watch a movie). This can all be done for less then $200, so why pay thousands of dollars for a system which appears to have it backwards? I guess I just never understood Kaleidescape. Or I guess more importantly, I don’t understand why you would pay thousands of dollar for a setup that you could easily create which a cheap home server and a few sub $200 players scattered throughout the house. Now granted Kaleidescape seems to be a foolproof way to accomplish this and from what I have heard, it is really a set it and forget it type system. I guess I am just not the intended consumer as I can accomplish the same thing (if not more) for a lot less money. Then again, any player that uses stateroom on a yacht in its description is obviously not targeted at me!!! I would be curious to see if anyone who reads this blog uses a Kaleidescape system and what are their thoughts.