Let’s say you have been spending tens of 1000’s of {dollars} to construct your self a elaborate residence theater. How would you go about truly watching films in it?
When you might all the time arrange a Roku or Apple TV field to stream on, they’re not going to really feel all that theatrical. Most streaming gadgets are too slowed down with banner advertisements and obnoxious upsells, and the streaming providers themselves compromise on audiovisual high quality for the sake of smoother streaming. Possibly what you really need is a tool that explicitly caters to videophiles with obsessively-manicured residence theater setups.
That’s what Kaleidescape has been attempting to perform for the previous 20 years. This small firm—with roughly 54 workers throughout its Mountain View headquarters and engineering workplaces in Waterloo—has made a reputation for itself amongst A/V diehards with its eye-poppingly costly video gamers, which mix the comfort of digital supply with Blu-ray high quality. Simply as notable, although, is its unfussy film participant software program, which clears away all of the cruft of recent streaming platforms to deal with the movies themselves.
“What we’re aiming at is attempting to get you to an expertise that’s as near the director’s intent as you probably can get,” says Tayloe Stansbury, Kaleidescape’s CEO and chairman.
The price of near-cinema high quality doesn’t come low-cost, at $4,000 for Kaleidescape’s entry-level Strato V Movie Player. However consider it or not, that is the beginning of Kaleidescape’s try to maneuver down-market, having beforehand charged upwards of $10,000 for its {hardware} (plus the associated fee to buy films at about $20 apiece).
Stansbury, a former Intuit CTO who took the helm at Kaleidescape after getting hooked on the system himself, says he’s on a mission to revitalize the corporate and attain new audiences after years of stagnant product growth. But when that’s the objective, Kaleidescape might finally have to reckon with the streaming enterprise fashions it’s spent all these years rejecting.
Hello-fi films
Not like most TV containers you should purchase right this moment, Kaleidescape doesn’t work with any streaming providers or include a free catalog of ad-supported content material. After establishing the Strato V, you’re offered with a sparse menu system for downloading films—both for buy or rental—and watching them.
And “downloading” is the right time period, as Kaleidescape doesn’t consider within the vagaries of streaming. Every movie takes about 10 minutes to accumulate over a gigabit wired ethernet connection—no Wi-Fi allowed—at which level it’ll play again even when the system’s offline. No different streaming platform helps that except you’re on a cellular machine.
“While you play it, it’s good each single time,” Stansbury says.
However the principle differentiator is the standard of the content material itself. Whereas Kaleidescape will get the identical supply recordsdata from studios as each different digital film retailer, it’s not within the enterprise of seeing how a lot compression it could possibly get away with. The corporate encodes video recordsdata at a mean 65 Mbps, versus 12 Mbps to 30 Mbps for different providers according to FlatpanelsHD, and it delivers lossless audio at 6 Mbps, matching or exceeding the standard of 4K Blu-ray discs with Dolby Imaginative and prescient and Dolby Atmos.
Kaleidescape can be obsessive about discovering points in its video recordsdata by human evaluation, and can both request updates from the studio or apply its personal transcoding coding adjustments to deal with them. (Stansbury says the corporate’s report variety of revisions for a single movie is 92.)
“It doesn’t matter if you happen to’re on an affordable TV with no soundbar, otherwise you’re in one million greenback theater, it’ll look and sound higher once you feed it with excessive constancy content material,” he says.
The result’s kind of like listening to a CD as an alternative of a lossy MP3 file: There are people who will insist the distinction is night time and day, others who won’t ever discover, and a 3rd group that feels higher on some intestine stage about having a pristine model both approach.
I most likely fall into the third class. Kaleidescape loaned a Strato V to evaluation for this story, and I made my eyes numb in search of barely-perceptible variations between Kaleidescape’s movies and their 4K HDR streaming counterparts. On my Samsung QD-OLED TV, the colours in Mad Max: Fury Street appeared extra pure than the on-demand model from Amazon, and perhaps the audio was somewhat clearer, however was I simply fooling myself? Arduous to say.
There was, nevertheless, one apparent enchancment: Kaleidescape does a greater job with subtitles. Its model of Parasite, for example, used a a lot nicer font with no black background like Netflix’s model, and sure translated phrases made extra sense (like “verify WhatsApp” as an alternative of “verify the messenger”).
Much more noticeable, no less than to me as a longtime reviewer of streaming players, was the simple nature of Kaleidescape’s interface, which in a approach it scratches the identical simplistic itch as an iPod for music. There’s a row of beneficial film purchases on the high, a row of downloaded films beneath, extra rows for movies-in-progress and favorites, and that’s it. The absence of distraction stands in sharp distinction to each trendy streaming platform.
Typically the sparseness will be vexing. There’s no voice search—no less than not with out dictating into Kaleidescape’s smartphone distant app—and the infrared distant requires line-of-sight to the field. However the system has some niceties as properly, like the gathering of common scenes you may leap to in every movie and the mixing with Lutron, which permits for residence automation in response to sure video queues, akin to elevating the lights when the credit begin rolling.
These sorts of experiences have made Kaleidescape a favourite amongst A/V installers, says John Sciacca, who lined Kaleidescape extensively as a contributing editor for Sound & Imaginative and prescient and works as a associate at an installer in South Carolina.
“All people desires it,” Sciacca says. “You may not need to pay for it, however you’ll like to personal it. And there’s not too many issues on the market that ship that form of an expertise.”
Dishonest dying
Kaleidescape didn’t begin off within the film obtain enterprise. Its first product, which launched in 2003, was a $30,000 video server that made digital copies of customers’ DVDs and performed all of them by single menu system.
Bloggers mocked the idea. (“If that’s not price promoting a kidney, we don’t know what’s,” Engadget‘s Paul Miller wrote in 2006.) However Kaleidescape won over home theater enthusiasts, who marveled at the way it made sense of their DVD collections. It even skipped the FBI warnings and different annoyances that DVD viewers needed to sit by.
“The expertise was simply higher,” says Josh Goldman, a longtime proprietor who runs the unbiased Kaleidescape Owners Forum. “You may immediately kind and discover different films you needed. You may discover associated films to the one you simply appreciated. You couldn’t actually do this with a rack of DVDs of their instances.”
However there was an issue: The DVD Copy Management Affiliation took concern with Kaleidescape’s digital copies, which had no approach of making certain that customers nonetheless owned their unique DVDs and weren’t sharing them. The group sued Kaleidescape in 2005 and finally prevailed after seven years of court battles. A settlement in 2014 allowed current clients to maintain utilizing their methods, however barred Kaleidescape from promoting any new methods with DVD ripping capabilities.
The lawsuit took its toll on Kaleidescape, which additionally bumped into manufacturing issues creating a brand new Blu-ray-based product across the identical time. In 2016, the corporate virtually shut down, with then-CEO Cheena Srinivasan blaming the lawsuit for “hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in authorized charges and years of misplaced focus” earlier than it secured an equity funding round to stay alive.
Sciacca says the corporate’s brush with dying helped speed up its pivot towards digital distribution, which had started a number of years earlier. With new funding and no extra authorized clouds, it was capable of make extra offers with film studios.
“Kaleidescape was based on disc-based importing,” he says. “The lawsuit paved the way in which for Kaleidescape 2.0, but additionally form of put an finish to Kaleidescape 1.0.”
Making strikes
Stansbury wound up accountable for Kaleidescape for considerably egocentric causes.
He acquired his first system in 2011, on the advice of an A/V vendor who was overhauling his residence theater. Though he fell in love with the product, he wound up getting pissed off with some gaps within the film catalog and had some concepts on the right way to revamp the product line. He reached out to Kaleidescape, providing to make introductions along with his contacts in Hollywood, which led to him turning into an investor within the firm earlier than taking the helm outright in 2020.
“I used to be irritated with some selections that have been made about product roadmaps, and I referred to as them as much as grump about these,” he says. “And finally that developed into assembly the chairman and being requested to take over management of the corporate.”
Stansbury factors to some issues Kaleidescape has achieved since then. Past delivery the Strato V, the corporate has launched new server merchandise with greater storage capacities, and it’s made a foray into B2B with a server product for film theaters. The concept is that exhibitors can use Kaleidescape for fast, versatile entry to back-catalog movies at top quality as an alternative of arranging for supply from studios.
“What we’ve achieved is cranked out a complete new bunch of merchandise,” Stansbury says. “We’ve acquired a complete bunch of latest merchandise I gained’t speak to you about which can be within the pipeline for the longer term, and we’ve additionally been steadily rising income and enhancing the monetary image for the corporate as properly.”
Sciacca, who was shut with former CEO Cheena Srinivasan, says that whereas Srinivasan was extra engineering-focused, Stansbury brings extra of a enterprise sensibility. “Tayloe, the brand new CEO, I feel he got here in with totally different enterprise concepts, and infusion of capital, and, you understand, ‘Fortune 500-think’ on the right way to run an organization,” he says. (Kaleidescape declined to make its former management accessible for interviews.)
Sticking to the previous
Again in 2016, when Kaleidescape narrowly prevented shutting down, Sciacca wrote a story for Sound & Vision questioning if residence media server merchandise might survive within the streaming age. Kaleidescape had outlasted a wave of opponents—Xperinet MIRV, Sunfire Theater Grand Media Participant, Leviton LEAPS, amongst others—however might by no means actually compete with streaming’s comfort.
He’s extra optimistic now, however believes the worth wants to return down additional. “On the finish of the day, if you happen to if you wish to purchase and watch films, there’s quite a lot of cheaper methods to do it,” he says.
However going additional down-market gained’t be simple. Kaleidescape’s film costs—$25 for new-release movies, $8 for a typical rental—isn’t a lot greater than different streaming platforms. Stansbury says Kaleidescape clients are surprisingly delicate about film costs, so it builds the price of its ongoing engineering work into the {hardware}. He’s not sure whether or not Kaleidescape might undertake a subscription mannequin that brings in ongoing income.
“Financially, I’d love that, however that doesn’t appear to be the place our clients’ heads are at,” he says. “They are typically extra of an possession mindset.”
Even so, Josh Goldman, who runs the Kaleidescape Proprietor’s Discussion board, believes the corporate ought to transfer to a cloud-based system. The Strato V can solely retailer 10 films at a time, so clients should both continuously re-download movies or tack on one other server, beginning at $5,000. Whereas his discussion board is extra lively now than it as soon as was, he believes the variety of individuals keen to put in costly server methods of their house is shrinking, and residential web speeds at the moment are quick sufficient to maintain up with Kaleidescape’s bitrates.
“That’s acquired to be the last word survival plan for the corporate to take care of and ship the very best film procuring, supply, and playback expertise,” he says. “It could’t be about storage within the residence. It’s clearly acquired to go away.”
Past simply chasing decrease costs, Kaleidescape faces a extra existential problem: More and more the content material individuals need to watch at residence can’t be purchased on digital video shops. If you wish to watch Severance, you want Apple TV+. If you wish to watch Squid Sport, you want Netflix. These reveals aren’t accessible on Kaleidescape in any respect.
Stansbury says he’s had conversations with streamers about probably promoting high-fidelity variations of their streaming exclusives. And in some instances, that content material is co-developed with a conventional studio, wherein case it does finally change into accessible to buy a 12 months or two after launch.
However he additionally factors out that Kaleidescape’s deal with films is turning into a much bigger benefit because the DVD and Blu-ray enterprise dry up. Finest Purchase, Walmart, and Goal have all stopped selling physical media, and fewer films are popping out on disc within the first place. Main streaming platforms, in the meantime, don’t even provide Blu-ray high quality as an possibility.
“The one solution to get that’s by Kaleidescape, so it does put us in an more and more distinctive place,” Stansbury says.
So perhaps Kaleidescape doesn’t have to adapt to the streaming world, as a result of it’s survived this lengthy taking part in a unique recreation completely. No matter occurs subsequent, fanatics like Goldman aren’t betting in opposition to it.
“Our laser disc participant is gone, our VCRs are gone, even our TiVo is gone,” he says. “Every part has modified, however Kaleidescape, remarkably, has been a constant a part of our residence video looking forward to 20 years, which actually is wonderful.”
