[Digg This!]MyTVPal.com has announced the launch of North America's first HD 1080p IPTV service. The service uses the MaxiStream IMX 1020HD High Definition IPTV 1080p Receiver.
I'm not sure whether this is the first HD IPTV box in North America because DaveTV released a HD capable PVR back in January, although I'm not sure whether it was sold in the US and I can't find that much information on it either.
Additionally AT&T were supposed to be rolling out its new HD IPTV PVR this month and also we have just seen the release of the UKs first High Definition PVR, the Evesham iPlayer, although its not been released in North America.
MyTVPal IPTV
Stepping back from the MaxiStream box and looking at the actual MyTVPal IPTV service, if you compare it to something like the new HD content you can download with the Xbox 360 video download service, then MyTVPal is the next step where you watch videos instantly, without the need to download. Getting something instantly is of course, much better than waiting.
I like the idea of this but MyTVPal fails in so many ways to offer a good service. The amount of VOD content is extremely slim and there was no VOD content that I could recognize, paid or free.
The company also offers regular internet TV channels but the lineup of channels is pretty sparse. MyTVPal boasts thousands of channels when in fact there are probably no more than 150 English speaking channels, with very few being in HD.
The service is also available on the PC but when I tried to use the software available on the site it wouldn't work, and I had to fill in a lengthy form to download it. The exact same player also seems to be available from movie99.tv.
I did endevour to try it out on another PC and it did work this time, although it was a bit unresponsive and prone to crashing. The EPG system was by no means impressive and the channel listing contains mostly regular internet TV channels that are already available online. It really is great to see these internet TV channels hitting the living room in a set top box, but I'd rather just use an internet browser to access the channels than the EPG system offered by MyTVPal.
MyTVPal has said it will offer PVR functionality and user generated content sometime next year. These would be worthwhile features but would still not bring that much to the core offerings of the product.
The website of MyTVPal is also very poor and scattered with random adverts and there are no details of who the company is or where it is located, similarly this information was lacking from the press release. I am lead to believe that MyTVPal and movie99.tv are all part of Maxistream.
The press release also states that MyTVPal is looking to release 100,000 Maxistream IMX 1020HD boxes and reach 10 million users. These are numbers I do not think MyTVPal has any chance of achieving with its current offerings.
In Conclusion
While the Maxistream IMX 1020HD looks like a decent IPTV box with HDTV capabilities it lacks a good service behind it to make it worth using. MyTVPal has the right idea, but fails to deliver.
1. What kind of bandwidth is needed in order to run one of these boxes? It is not stated in the article. It would seem that a 1.5-3 Mbps service wont work for boxes like these.
Posted at 3:20PM on Nov 28th 2006 by Mike