We caught up Amino Communications at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) where they were show casing their Freedom Jump set-top box which is powered by MeeGo and provides integration with a users existing Digital (DVB-T) box. We do have to stress that this demo is on a 5 week old box and this would be considered a pre-Alpha build but as can be seen from the video later on it does give an indication of where the company is going with this box.

The Box has a WebKit chromium HTML 5 browser that supports Flash 10.1 and is designed to offer access to additional content available on the internet including apps, catch-up TV (BBC iPlayer, Hulu) , music services and social networking, Movie on Demand, YouTube and Vimeo. All the services are to be combined into a single electronic program guide (EPG) by utilising Blinx.

Boxes provided through cable or TV operators will be pretty much locked down in terms of end user access to System level resources, but Boxes purchased through Intel will be fairly “Hackable”. To this extent we saw a standard Fedora binary (Open Arena) being executed on the box without any modification and we know this will appeal (or we hope so) to our core readers.

THE FREEDOM JUMP
The Freedom Jump is the perfect OTT companion, easily adding OTT content without costly existing device change outs.Open up a new world of OTT content for your customers to explore – without costly change outs of your existing device. That’s the simple premise for the Freedom Jump – a powerful new addition to the Amino OTT product family.

Compact – but powered by the CE4150 Intel® Atom core and MeeGo™ – the Freedom Jump works alongside your cable or satellite STB to add an exciting new layer of content to your branded consumer experience. So as well as your well-established range of entertainment services, your customers can now access the wealth of additional content available on the open Internet such as movie-on-demand services, catch-up TV, Internet music services and social networking. All of this blended seamlessly into your own user interface.

The Freedom Jump is the ideal choice for cable and satellite operators looking to deploy OTT services – and prevent “cord-cutting” by customers – in a practical and cost-effective way.

Specifications of the Amino Freedom are:

Intel CE4150 Processor
250 Gb Hard Disk Drive
512Mb RAM Main memory
HDMI 1.3 Composite Video (Shipping with HDMI 1.4)
Analogue Audio
Ethernet 10/100 BASE-T
2 x USB 2.0

Below are some additional shots of the box:-