CES 2013: Seagate's Central gives home users a central place for files as well as a SmartTV app

Sunday, January 06, 2013

Seagate built this product for simplicity. By focusing on the number one need for homes with more than one computer, Seagate designed an easy, centralized backup for each computer in the home, regardless of operating system. Seagate retooled the software and user experience for the Seagate Central shared storage so that it seamlessly provides a backup for each system on a home network, even in a mixed platform environment of Windows OS and Mac OS X computers. In addition to automatic and continuous backup of all the computers in a home, Seagate Central can also backup photos and videos directly from Facebook, a feature first introduced in the award-winning Backup Plus line of external drives.

“This is the ideal backup solution for the family of today, who increasingly have multiple computers, tablets and smart phones,” said Scott Horn, vice president of marketing at Seagate. “We focused on what would make Central easy to use in a home setting. Consumers will find Central storage is easy-to-use as a backup solution with great-looking apps that deliver access to people’s content from the world’s most popular mobile devices, as well as Samsung Smart televisions and Blu-ray players.”

A recent study from Parks Associates found consumers keep content in a wide variety of places including sites like Facebook. The average broadband household has 8% of their music, video, and photo content on social networking sites.

“Consumers are looking for storage solutions that help them consolidate and safeguard the content they’ve got scattered across a growing number of places,” said John Barrett, director of Consumer Analytics at Parks Associates. “Young consumers in particular do not have central repositories of content but rather many places where content naturally ends-up as a result of their media habits.”