Western Digital is a manufacturer of hard disk drives, which has a long history in developing different storage devices. The company was founded in 1970 under the name of General Digital and it specialized in semiconductor test equipment. In 1971 General Digital became Western Digital and as time flew by, today the company is the second largest hard drive manufacturers after Seagate Technology.

Now Western Digital intends to expand its business beyond hard drives and it has introduced WD TV, a device that launches the company in the market of TV media players. The device’s aspect is straight forward, having a simple design, almost classical, being a black box that incorporates a hard drive and that can be operated by remote control.

The player is capable of reading a large variety of video, photo and audio formats which can be viewed via another mass storage device. In other words, a user must connect the media player to a mobile hard drive or memory stick on which files were previously loaded and using the player’s simple interface the user can listen or view those files.

The price tag for this device is of $129.99, making Western Digital’s player competitive with other similar products. The player is capable of reading MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC), H.264, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264), Subtitle SRT (UTF-8) video files and comes with a video converter.

All in all, WD TV is out there, creating competition for other similar devices like Iomega's ScreenPlay TV.