Gadgetory

hey I'm Matthew miskovic from cnet and today we are going to take a look at Blair this is a neat looking device that promises to stream a whole bunch of free web video content from your laptop tablet or smartphone for just ninety nine dollars now the player has a pretty cool look to it but a lot of the allure wears off once you get it in your hands there's no getting around that the product just feels cheap in your hand and the plastic casing actually split apart when I pulled it out of the box pop off the top cover and you'll see players HDMI plug that's designed to slide right into a spare port on your TV so what's this cable for well HDMI doesn't provide enough juice to power player so there's a micro USB port on the side that you can connect to a power outlet using the included adapter or your TV's USB port if it has one the dangling cable does spoil a lot of players just a stick design and the other problem is that I had an awfully tough time getting the cable that actually fit in the port the plastic casing and the port just don't line up that well so getting the USB plug to fit can be a real struggle getting player setup to work with your wireless network and devices is straightforward with simple on-screen instructions once it's set up you can start streaming player has apps for iOS and Android devices which offer pre-selected content but a lot of it ends up being Clips rather than full episodes the real appeal of player is the chrome plugin that supposedly lets you stream any web video from your browser to player even better after you select a video to play player works independently of your computer so you can turn off your laptop or use it for something else now that's the pitch but in practice I found it to be pretty unreliable full episodes of Saturday Night Live worked but late night with jimmy fallon and conan didn't the colbert would stream but only with an annoying overlay over the video content The Daily Show didn't have that overlay but it did have closed captions and there was no way to turn them off even more frustrating is that there were a lot of glitches during playback and I never quite made it through an entire show without at least one minor glitch and most time the glitches were more significant there's also the issue of image quality some stuff could look good like 1080p streams from YouTube but most of the times the video quality was pretty poor with a lot of artifacts and framerate issues there's also a lot of content that player doesn't even attempt to stream big-name services like Netflix and HBO GO or off the table and it won't play your personal music collection or stream for music services like Pandora so with all the glitches and limitations player just isn't really recommendable right now it's just too unreliable and there's not enough good content that works there are also a lot of great competing boxes for a hundred dollars like the Roku 3 and Apple TV both of which offer a lot more functionality including a fair amount of web video content and if you're really looking to stream web video to your TV your best bet is still connecting a five dollar hdmi cable from your laptop to your TV it may not be the sleekest or most convenient solution but it's cheap and a lot more reliable i'm matthew miskovic from cnet and this is player