Barnes & Noble

Oct 01 2012

News - Barnes & Noble Announces Nook Video to Accompany New Nook Tablets

By Matthew Miller

Nook VideoBarnes & Noble announced two new tablets this week, the Nook HD and the Nook HD+. Last year, the Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire were the big contenders in the media consumption tablet wars. This year, B&N not only needs to contend with an updated Kindle Fire, but also the Google Nexus 7 and potentially the oft-rumored iPad Mini. To help out, Barnes & Noble also announced their new Nook Video service this week. The Nook Video announcement quickly got lost in the shuffle, but with partners like HBO, Sony, STARZ, and Disney already on-board, the movie and TV rental and purchasing service promises to hit the ground running. Nook Video will be an UltraViolet service, allowing users to store their digital copies from physical media in the Nook Cloud. What's more, Nook Video will be available as a cross-device app, further expanding the potential of the service to interoperate with a variety of devices, an important consideration for mixed platform and mixed device households. This could be a particuarly good move as the Nook line has established itself as a favorite secondary family tablet as evidenced by B&N's announcement that the new Nooks would have multi-user profile switching capabilities, a rarity in tablets to date. Barnes & Noble has not announced pricing or an exact launch date, though with the new Nooks due out at the beginning of Novemeber, we probably don't have long to wait.

Partners so far include HBO, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, STARZ, Viacom and Warner Bros. Entertainment, plus “favorite movies” from Walt Disney. “Other leading studios” will be announced soon, according to the release. For now, Paramount and NBC/Universal are missing.

Barnes & Noble is partnering with UltraViolet, the initiative from Hollywood studios that lets viewers watch content across devices and aims to break Apple’s stranglehold on the digital movie market.

PaidContent

Dec 25 2011

News - Plex App Coming for Nook Tablets

By Matthew Miller

The folks at Plex have been working hard to get their client on as many platforms as possible, including mobile platforms such as iOS and Android. In the run up to the holiday shopping season, the two biggest Android tablet releases were the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, and Plex was quick to show up in the Amazon Android Marketplace for the Kindle Fire. It took a bit longer, but it would appear that Plex will soon be making its way over to the Nook Color and Nook Tablet as well. Barnes & Noble does have more extensive approval process, and this will be welcome news for Nook-loving Plex users, even if that might be a small audience. It should look and work largely identical to the standard Android Plex app, and given that the Nook Color and Kindle Fire have comparable hardware specs, performance should not be an issue either.

Plex on Nook

Plex arriving in the Nook Store is actually a big boon for Barnes & Noble and its users, since it helps leverage users’ own existing media libraries, providing access to more video and music content, an area where the Nook lags behind Amazon’s Kindle Fire(s amzn). 

GigaOm

Nov 11 2011

News - Attack of the Inexpensive Media Streaming Tablets: Nook Tablet vs. Kindle Fire

By Matthew Miller

Nook Tablet vs. Kindle Fire

As we all know at this point, Amazon announced their first proper tablet, the Kindle Fire, at the end of September. Based on Android and built to tie into the collection of services that Amazon has built, there was a lot to like about it, especially its $199 price tag. Much was made of it as an iPad competitor, but in size and price, it more directly competes with the Barnes & Noble Nook Color. Amazon had little to say at the time about what kind of apps the Kindle Fire would run, but the general assumption was that the Kindle Fire would be largely limited to Amazon's cloud services for media consumption. Even so, the Kindle Fire was very definitely a media consumption tablet that also acted as an e-reader while the Nook Color was an e-reader that could also run some tablet apps; it wasn't set to be much of a competition.

This week Barnes & Noble announced the Nook Color's successor, the Nook Tablet. The Nook Tablet is priced at $249, but it has a more powerful processor, more memory, and a predecessor to drop to the $199 price point with the Kindle. What's more, the Nook Tablet is a media consumption tablet in the vein of the Kindle Fire, but with the pledged support of some very big names.

Barnes and Noble just announced its Nook Tablet with plenty of content coming along for the ride. Most notable is Netflix integration, described by B&N as the deepest on any tablet with Netflix recommendations getting pushed to your homescreen. B&N calls the 7-inch tablet an "unrivaled portable content machine" and backs up the claim with preloaded Pandora and Hulu Plus services (and free trials). Flixster with UltraViolet is also coming soon with newly released movies and TV shows from Warner Bros. and others.

The Verge

The Kindle Fire remained a formidable entry to the tablet market, but for a short time it appeared that Barnes & Noble might have fielded a true champion. That is, until Amazon decided to share a bit more about the Kindle Fire.

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