Techcitement Review: Western Digital TV Live Hub

For those of us content to get our entertainment media from our PCs, the last few years have brought a wealth of options. Photos, music, movies, TV, whether downloaded or streamed, it’s virtually impossible to say there’s nothing on anymore. Unfortunately, the PC entertainment experience often leaves something to be desired when it compared to what you can get out of your television. Watching Avatar on a 10-inch netbook is less than ideal for me, to say the least. And many less tech-savvy users don’t want to be entertained in front of a computer at all. They have a nice comfortable couch right across from that great big television, so why sit in a chair at a desk watching a computer monitor?

Fortunately, we’ve started seeing a few solutions for getting content to your TV as conveniently as you can get it to your computer, and the Western Digital TV Live Hub provides one of the most flexible solutions I’ve seen yet. At first glance, it’s a straight-up Roku competitor, letting you stream video from sites like Netflix and Hulu Plus or music from options like Pandora and Spotify straight to your TV. As long as you have an available internet connection you never need a PC, and you can control everything from a familiar remote. There are other devices that have a wider streaming selection, but Western Digital covers most of the major players and more are regularly added, so you shouldn’t miss much.

But Western Digital isn’t in the streaming media business. More than anything else, this is a company known for their hard drives, and the Hub is no exception. Unlike many competitors, Western Digital has included a 1 TB hard drive in this device, so you can use it to store photos, music, and video, and play them on your TV, without needing a streaming service. The hard drive also behaves as a network attached storage device, so you can access that content from any computer on your home network, making it an excellent backup drive for your media.

The Hub makes loading up its hard drive with media a quick and easy process. You can either transfer files over your home network or plug any external hard drive into one of its two USB ports and copy them over directly. If your external drive is also made by Western Digital, this process is almost completely automated. If 1 TB isn’t enough room for you, you can leave that external drive plugged in and expand the Hub. You even have the option of streaming media from your PC to the Hub over your home network, in case you run out of storage entirely. That last option may be a bit complex for those who won’t watch video on a PC to begin with, but for those just looking for a more comfortable viewing experience, it shouldn’t pose any trouble.

Overall, the Western Digital has provided a wonderful experience, but there are a few areas where this device could still stand some improvement. The included remote works fine, but it’s got far too many buttons for what it’s capable of. There’s just no reason to include a number pad on a device that doesn’t use numbered channels, especially when they can’t even double as a T9 keyboard. Searching for anything on Netflix with this device takes me back to the days of entering high scores on Pac-Man, and it only gets more frustrating every time I try to hit one of those number keys when I type. My brain keeps thinking I’m trying to text on my cellphone from six years ago, but those keys don’t do a thing. In fact, I had to consult the product website to figure out why the number pad was included at all. Turns out you can program playlists to launch automatically on a number press. Personally, I’d have been happier with a Roku-style simplified remote.

The Hub does include some gaming options, but they’re extremely sparse. And once again that remote comes up short, lacking the Wii-like motion controls of the Roku XS. There are some cute casual games on the Hub, but I don’t expect many users to put much time into them.

I was originally excited to see that Western Digital had included component audio/video ports as well as HDMI, because it meant I could test out the Hub on my old living room TV. Nice as the inclusion was, however, it was clearly an afterthought. Content comes out looking great, but the interface was never designed for anything but high definition wide-screen sets. Many of the menus were unreadable due to small text on the old CRT television. Netflix titles were particularly useless, to the point where I found myself reading movie names off of the images instead of the text. And there never seemed to be enough horizontal space on the screen to include full titles of content on the hard drive, because the 4×4 grid of rectangles was clearly meant for something with a 16:9 aspect ratio, not 4:3. I guess it’s asking a bit much for creators of such forward-thinking tech to put a lot of effort into supporting such outdated companion hardware, but if they’re putting in the ports, it would’ve been nice to see better UI support.

The most shocking disappointment I discovered, however, was that such an advanced device lacks a WiFi connection. I had to run a 12-foot ethernet cable from my router to my TV if I wanted to make use of any of the network or streaming capabilities. Alternatively, you could add a WiFi dongle through one of the USB ports, or even use a powerline adapter to turn your home power lines into a network (Western Digital recommends their own Livewire, of course). But it seems expensive to need a $50 accessory just to get your $200 Hub working. An Xbox 360 with a 250 GB hard drive only costs $300 after all, and it’ll provide you with roughly equal media capabilities and a much better gaming experience. That ignores the potential need to buy cables, because the Hub comes with only a power cord. No ethernet cable, no HDMI cable, and no component cable included.

Overall, I’m a big fan of the Western Digital TV Live Hub. As long as you have the hardware to support it and can run a cable easily enough from your router to your TV, you’re getting something only a little more expensive than a Roku and an external hard drive. In exchange, you get more out of the combination than you’d ever get by having them separately.