MW: Hi Charlie. Can you tell us a little about yourself, what you do at HP, and your role in the development of the MediaSmart Server?

CS: My name is Charlie Shilling and I've been working in the technology field my entire career. In this position I'm a future product manager, and I'm focused on future product definition and development. What that really means is I research and understand customer needs and translate them into solutions working with our engineering teams. I love the whole connected home and the digital media space. I use these products myself and I have a lot friends who are using them, so I have a lot of personal experience with them. As far as getting deeper customer insight, I conduct focus groups, usability studies, and quantitative surveys to get a deep and rich understanding of our customer.

So when we see new products that come out, like the new EX495 and EX490 that we're going to discuss in a minute, you're like "The Man" behind this... the one that determines where the MediaSmart Server goes and what's in it?

Right. Starting from the product inception when it's just a concept, we take that concept and put meat and bones around it, bring it to market and launch it. I look at product concepts that go from introduction to about one to three years in the future, so we're working on products now that you will see years into the future.

So let's talk about the latest MediaSmart Server that just came out, which is the EX490 and EX495. Can you tell us about these new models, in a nutshell, and what makes them different from the previous generation?

Sure. Of course I'd love to get into it deeper, but in a nutshell, the EX490 and EX495 have more power, more capacity, more control for the user, a lot more Mac capability, and all this at a lower price. That's kind of the nutshell answer of what these new products have to offer. 

When you mentioned control and flexibility, which is one thing I've noticed HP really hit home in this particular generation of MediaSmart Servers, was your target here to really go after the enthusiast market? Who was your target?

In general, our target customer is living in a connected home with Mac and PCs loaded with photos, music, and videos. More specifically, we're really addressing two types of customers within that type of home. One customer we're delivering great solutions for is what I call the "technology and media enthusiast." That's the customer that wants a lot of control, a lot of features, and a lot of power. That's really what the EX495 is all about. We're also trying to address our new customer, which is someone really trying to solve a particular problem, like sharing music around the house, convert video, or access to their media while on the road. They're just looking for one or two solutions, and they're not quite as sophisticated when it comes to technology use... they are more enthralled with the solution as opposed to the technology.

So let's dive right into that technology and talk first about the hardware on the EX490 and EX495. What can you point out that's new and exciting?

Certainly. One of the highlights is the dual core processor on the EX495. That really shines when it comes to video conversion, and both of our target customers can take advantage of this new processor. If they're doing a lot of video conversion this dual core processor will process and convert video twice as fast as the single core we're offering and eight times as fast as something using an Atom processor.

So, the dual core is really doing processing a lot faster in the background, meaning if you have a pile of videos you're hoping to get converted, it gets your videos converted faster. The EX490 has an Intel Celeron Processor which has about a ten percent speed improvement from the previous EX485 / EX487 MediaSmart Servers.

That's something different about this generation. Typically the drive space was the differentiator between models, but this time there's a processor difference as well. Why the extra hardware difference?

We know there are various types of customers out there with various different needs, and we want to branch out to meet those customer needs. I mentioned that we are addressing two different target customers with these new MediaSmart Servers. The EX495 is targeting a more advanced customer that wants more performance, capacity and control. The Dual Core Intel Pentium processor provides the additional power, the 1.5 TB drive provides the extra capacity and the additional control comes from additional capabilities in the video converter and media collector.

The EX490 is targeting the customer that wants all the same functionality as the EX 495, and a good starting point for storage capacity. The single core Intel Celeron processor and 1TB of storage along with all of the MediaSmart Server software gives them everything they need with room to grow, all at a very compelling new price.

You talked about changes in capacity, which begs the question. Does this model support eSATA port multipliers so you can really expand out the drive space using eSATA?

Yes it does. Both the EX490 and EX495 both support port multipliers. You can add multiple eSATA drives hanging off the back to dramatically increase the server's capacity, and access that extra capacity at a faster speed than a USB drive.

Do you know how many it supports?

HP has tested various 4 and 5 bay eSATA hard drive enclosures to assure the functionality of this feature. HP cannot specify or recommend specific eSATA hard drive enclosure models because the firmware and configurations change.

That means there must be some changes in the core. Is the motherboard in the EX490 and EX495 the same? Is it different from the EX487 line?

The mother boards in the EX 490 and EX495 are interchangeable with one another, but the motherboards on the EX49X series are not interchangeable with the other EX series MediaSmart Servers.

That was a great overview of the hardware, so let's now talk about software. As we mentioned before, this update seems focused on the enhancement of several key media-focused features, namely the Video Converter and Media Collector. I'd like to talk about the video converter first since it's really undergone the most major transformation from the last generation to this one. What can you tell us about the video converter?

The purpose of the video converter is to take a broad range of video formats and automatically convert those videos into a format and size that enables users to watch the videos on a broad range of devices and in different locations - so the video converter enables users to watch their videos on their TV in their living room, on PC's throughout the home, on PC's when you are away from the home via the internet, and on mobile devices, like iPhones, PS3's etc.

There are two big improvements on the video converter. First, for the less tech savvy user we offer a variety of standard profiles to use for video conversion, so the user can simply select a profile that matches the device they want to use for viewing video, for example full resolution, PS3's, iPhones etc.

For the more advanced video enthusiast that want more control of how their videos are converted, or want some unique video output settings, we offer an advanced controls feature that allows the user to set the output display size, frames per second, video and audio bit rates. There is also a graphical scale  that shows the recommended bandwidth required to stream that video setting. These settings can be shown or hidden by checking the "show advanced settings" box in the video converter user interface.

I'm told the update to Converter in this generation supports more video input formats. Which new formats does it support?

We've added the MP4 and M4V with certain flavors of h.264 with AAC audio, which is a very common format. We've also added the MKV container with h.264 video and AAC audio.

What about the new .wtv format that Windows Media Center uses in the upcoming Windows 7 OS?

.wtv is a closed format; Microsoft does not offer that up for Windows Home Server, so we are not able to support that with our Video Converter.

Let's talk about Macs. There are a number of Mac focused enhancements in the EX490 and EX495. In some ways, getting Windows Home Server Mac friendly must be like fitting a square peg into a round hole, but HP seems determined to make the MediaSmart Server as Mac friendly as possible. Let's talk about the latest improvements you've made for Mac users.

First off, Mac users can now administer their server from a Mac, and these UIs are now convergent, so the console you see on a Windows PC is the same console you see on a Mac. We've got a new homepage that's web based, and also common to PC and Mac. So, we've got administration, a common UI, and we've also added a bare-metal recovery feature that you can do from a Mac. Before, we worked with Time Machine and you could do a recovery, but you had to first load the OS and server software, then restore all your data files. Now we've got a utility called bare-metal recovery that works with a flash key, and it contains the algorithms to restore your Time Machine image back onto your Mac if you need to do a recovery.

And according to our tests, it works petty well. Now, how important is the Mac audience to HP for this product? It does seem like it's a lot of trouble to make a Windows based product like this work well with Macs.

Well, it is a fair amount of work for us. The reason we're going in to this extra effort is because our target customer has Mac's and PC's on their home network, and those networked computers have lots of photos, music and videos on them, and customer wants to protect, centralize and share all of their media.. So, that's really why we're going after the Mac market so strongly.

Of the missing Mac features, it seems like you hit most of them with the release of the EX490 and EX495, the one thing missing is the ability to set up a MediaSmart Server with a Mac. Do you think that's ever going to happen?

We continue to investigate that.

There's another Mac feature that I wanted to add, which is the Media Collector. We've got it on Macs now, and I think it's a great feature for this new customer we're going after that really wants a simpler solution. We think the broader market will be very much attracted to Media Collection; you hook the server up, make sure your systems are on the network, and it pulls all your media in just like the last version did.

It has gotten better since the last version. What new features does the Media Collector offer?

What's new on our Media Collector this year, as I mentioned, is that it works Macs so you can collect from Mac computers, but you also now have a lot more control. This new version of the HP MediaSmart Server software has a lot more control, and the Media Collector also has lot more control. For example, let's say you want to collect from your Mac, but you only want photos from a single directory. Now you can drill down into the client device's file structure and collect photos or music from a particular directory. So, you have a lot more control on which media you're collecting from which client device and which location. There's a lot of control now for those who want it. It's invisible if you don't, but it's a feature in the software if you want it.

It's great, too. It has quickly become one of my favorite new features on the MediaSmart Server, and it works really, really well. It also works as a background task now instead of a scheduled task, which is something important to highlight.

Yep, there's two parts there, I think you covered them but it's important to call them out. One is that it runs continuously so it's more like a service, and the other is that it's running on the server so it puts less load on the client device.

There have been a lot of great improvements here like the Media Collector and Video Converter specifically. Where else do you see the MediaSmart Server going and improving from here? What kinds of things do you think about?

We want to continue to deliver dynamite, leading edge technology products for the technology enthusiast that we're really addressing right now, but we want to expand to a broader audience. That audience is one that continues to be in a mixed Mac/PC household, has lots of media on those Macs and PCs, but this customer is a little less technology savvy and they're really just trying to solve one or two particular problems. Rather than, those who want the latest and greatest or all the features and functionality. This new target customer wants to consolidate their media collection, share it through the home, or someone who wants access to the media on the road. I want to clarify that we're not going for the masses here, and we're not really taking this all the way to the broad mass market, but we're trying to head in that direction. So all I can do is comment on the direction we're going with the new EX490 and EX495 MediaSmart Servers, and that's try to address both of these markets.

Let's talk about the past generations. Back in May, around the time the 2.5 update for the EX487 and EX485 came out, HP promised an upgrade for MediaSmart Server owners sometime this fall. With this release, and the updates now present on the EX495, can you share with us what the EX470/475, LX195, EX485/487 customers are going to get? Will it be everything present on the 495, or will it vary depending on the server they have?

We continue to work on the upgrade for existing customers and will share a status update with more details when we have one to share publicly.

I really appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions and talking to us about the EX490 and EX495. We have a few minutes left; can you answer some questions sent in by MediaSmarthome Members?

Sure.

I'll keep this first question simple. MediaSmart Home member Silorak wants to know, "Is the EX490/495 is going to be available globally at some point in the future?"

HP is going to announce availablility of these new MediaSmart Servers for select countries throughout Europe some time in October.

This question comes from member King of Mars. "Are there any planned updates to the MediaSmart iStream App?"

Our users should see an update to the HP iStream application in the near future. The iStream v1.1.34 update provides performance improvements for iPhone OS 3.0 or later. Improvements include a more responsive user interface when starting large videos, faster photo viewing, improved MP3 streaming and Spanish language support.

A question from member robgore along that train of thought. "Are you going to expand the mobile streaming apps to possibly support Symbian or Windows Mobile." And, I'll expand that question and toss the Pre and Android in there.

We continue to monitor trends in the mobile market. For now we believe we have a great solution with the HP iStream application to share the customer’s personal content.

We're just about out of time, so is there any final thoughts you had or anything else you wanted to say to the members of MediaSmart Home?

Sure. Here is a quick summary:

• Our home server solution is based on:
  • Protecting your computer's data and media (precious memories)
  • Centralizing and sharing media
  • Entertainment features that allow customers to enjoy their media anytime, anywhere
  • all wrapped in an easy to use, reliable solution

Our new HP MediaSmart Servers have:

• More power - Intel dual core processor on the EX495
• More capacity - 1 & 1.5 TB
• More control - with media collecting and video converting
• More Mac capability - for mixed computer hh
• Easy to use -new user interfaces, web based home page
• Lower price

We are very excited about these new products that are bringing great new features to our core customers, and expanding to a new customer that is looking for an easier to use Home Server with all the functionality they need. Thank you for speaking with me about the HP MediaSmart Servers.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.