Oh goody! It’s another set-top box for us to use and perhaps once again, throw into the corner. It seems that Sharp a new media streaming ‘toy’ in Japan next year. Personally, I am not convinced it will meet with any real success here in the states anytime soon though, what with the crazy new laws and all.

This year definitely was the year of the streaming media device. Sharp is introducing a new unit in Japan early next year, called the CE-MR01, designed to stream a variety of image and movie formats over Wi-Fi. And it looks nice and all (you really can’t tell with these things until you use the interface), but I can’t help but wonder if they are just a flash in the pan.

DVDs are still a dominant content delivery platform for movies and television, which means everyone will need a DVD player. PVRs with hard drives are common for people with cable and satellite television. There are plenty of set-top boxes already, I’m saying. Since these streaming media devices are basically just decoding chipsets with Wi-Fi and Ethernet, why do they need to be separate units at all? I bet by this time next year, you’ll be hard pressed to buy a DVD player that doesn’t do streaming media from a network share.