Netgear unveils Mother of home hubs

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[intro] Netgear may just have produced the Holy Grail in home entertainment hubs – the Digital Entertainer. [/intro]

Now that’s cool. Time-shifting thanks to a Sky+ box is all very sweet, but you’re tied to one room (you record to the one box, and watch the recorded show in the same place). But now Netgear has added Place-Shifting to the equation thanks to a feature in its new EVA8000 called ‘Follow Me’.

Record a show using this new network hub, and you can continue watching a show you’ve paused in another room. You’ll use the feature maybe once in a year, but if that’s an issue, why are you reading this?

Priced at around $349 and available some time soon, the 8000 receiver (also cheesily known as the Digital Entertainer) will take care of hi-def streaming across every computer in your home, and comes with its own EPG (which, we might add, looked decidedly slick). They’ve even built in a special section for YouTube clips, guaranteeing whole evenings of mindless fun for the entire family.

You don’t need to install any software on any of your Macs or PCs for the EVA to do its thing: it just finds your movies, tunes and photos on the network and shows them on your TV. We want one.

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Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website. Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.