Episode 43 - A Chat with Linear's Duane Paulson

We were pleased on this episode to be joined by Duane Paulson, Senior VP of Product & Market Development for Linear. Duane is a long time technology veteran whose background lends him a very unique perspective on the industry. We were eager to get his take not only on what Linear has been up to, but also on current trends in the smarthome at large. We close the conversation with a discussion of what we can expect form Linear at CES2015, where Duane surprised even us by breaking some news right here on HomeTech! But you'll have to listen to the end if you want to know more about that!

In the news portion of our show this week we discuss two stories. The first being the recent unveiling of Kaleidescape's new Alto movie player. This is the first product in the company's lineup to exclude the ability to load content from physical discs. Users instead will only be given the option to download content from Kaleidescape's online store. Although not explicitly stated in any of the releases we've read, this move is clearly a reaction to the legal troubles Kaleidescape has been continually battling. And at $2,500 MSRP, we suspect it will be a tough sell for consumers who can get much of the same functionality from a $99 AppleTV. Speaking of inexpensive streaming media servers, we also cover the recent update released by Amazon for the FireTV. What makes this story interesting is the inclusion of code that "bricked" jailbroken hardware. Anyone who had previously hacked one of these units now has themselves a rather expensive paper weight.

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