With the GoFlexAccess app, content stored on a home network can be accessed and viewed on a tablet or smart phone.
A new mobile-device app from Seagate makes it easy to retrieve movies, music, photos and other files while on the go. (read the announcement)
The GoFlexAccess app lets consumers remotely access all the digital content stored on a GoFlex Home network storage system. The free app can be downloaded from the iTunes Store and Android Market. Just search “Seagate” or “GoFlex” in either storefront using a computer or the app store on an iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch or Android-compatible mobile device.
Seagate’s GoFlex Home network storage system connects to a WiFi router, allowing centralized storage of photos, movies, music and documents in a home. And now consumers can easily access their files from inside or outside the home, using the new GoFlexAccess app.
“Tablets and smart phones have a relatively small amount of storage capacity available to them,” said Greg Falgiano, a senior product marketing manager at Seagate. “Most tablets, for example, are limited to 64GB of capacity, and there’s no way to upgrade the internal memory. With our new app, you can conveniently access any of the files stored at your home without storing it on your mobile device.”
With the GoFlexAccess app, all of the content stored on a home network—from PowerPoint and Excel files, to the latest hits from Lady Gaga and the Foo Fighters, to your movies and videos—goes with you, as long as you have access to a 3G/4G or WiFi network.
“GoFlex Home was designed to help our customers easily centralize storage in their home and conveniently backup the content on their computers over their wireless network,” said Marc Lee, a product line director at Seagate. “What we’re finding is that customers are now looking for an easy way to access all of that rich content while they’re away from home, using their Internet-connected device.”
“The GoFlex Home can store any kind of digital file you can imagine,” said Lee. “It’s up to your mobile device to be able to play those files back. The GoFlex Home and our app don’t put any kind of file restrictions on your mobile device.”
“From everything we know about the competition, we believe we’ll have the best-in-class mobile app of its kind, with a lot of features we think consumers will really appreciate,” added Falgiano.
For example, an icon displays album-cover art, which can be rotated to display other album tracks, on a smart phone or tablet. Consumers can also create slideshows from their photo collections—and play music to accompany them.
“They all sound like fairly simple things, but being able to stream your music or videos over the Internet to your mobile device, as if that content is really with you, is pretty powerful,” said Falgiano.
The GoFlexAccess app continues the company’s momentum in the mobile space; in February, Seagate launched its Seagate TV Remote app, which lets consumers control a GoFlex TV or FreeAgent Theater+ media player from an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch device.
“Many of our retail partners and end customers have told us these apps are great selling features,” said Falgiano. “Customers view them as delivering more value to the products they purchase.” —By Steve Pipe – Seagate Technology.
So, what is the limitation to the amount of mobile users that can be streamed to concurrently, from one device on a local network, say via wifi.
Say, 45 users with Iphones and Androids want to watch an HD pre-recorded movie on the Seagate drive.
Is it a matter of bandwidth? or?
The answer is…. It depends! The biggest variable is bit rate. Even HD has a bunch of different bit rate assumptions with Blue Ray being the highest quality. In general, when we work with set-top-box designers who are building multi room DVR systems, they like to target about 8 simultaneous HD streams as a bench mark (with some margin).
Our DVR specific drives, called Pipeline HD can manage this pretty well as they are tuned for video streaming. Depending on the overall spin speed and the performance of the specific drive your streaming from, it should be able to support somewhere in the 6-10 stream range. Then you have to consider the player, the network, other traffic, etc. A lot of variables here….
@Tim Higgins Hi Tim. I posed your question to the GoFlex team, and here is what they saud, “5 user accounts when remote, but multiple people can use the same account. Streaming performance will be limited by your Internet speed, most likely the upload speed from you home Internet connection. When in the local network, it depends on whether you are using WiFi, 100Mb Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet. Unfortunately, there are a lot of factors so there is no single number to reference. Oh and the quality of file will play a factor as well. ” Hope this helps. Thanks – Mark
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Will there be an App for the Blackberry Playbook soon?
@SanDiegan No immediate plans for a Blackberry Playbook app.
Downloaded the app, and it works great when I’m at home, but I can’t connect when I’m not connected to my home network. From comments in the app store it seems like lots of users are getting this same error message: “A connection failure occurred: SSL problem (possible a bad/expired/self-signed certificate.)
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The application really is hit and miss on functionality! Files that play on the phone (when stored in the phone’s memory) will not play when stored on the drive. I’ve tried accessing it via my home’s wifi network and via my cell network.
I often get an “Unsupported video format” error. The sad/funny part is, one video in that format will play, several others, wont. Very frustrating.
This “cloud” has a few BIG holes in it!!