Seagate wireless drive can now stream to Roku set-top box

Seagate Technology today announced a new tool that can connect the Seagate Central personal cloud storage service or a Seagate Wireless Plus hard drive to a Roku streaming player.

The new Seagate Media Channel on Roku allows pictures, video and music saved to a Seagate Central cloud service or Seagate Wireless Plus to be streamed to the Roku box.

“While Roku provides more than 1,500 channels, the new Seagate channel will enable consumers to also easily access owned content, including music, home videos, photos and licensed movies from the same interface,” Seagate said in a statement.

The Seagate Media Channel on Roku also allows browsing of content on the drive with cover art for movies, albums, song titles for music and thumbnails for photos.

The Seagate Wireless Plus drive comes with up to 2 terabytes of capacity for $200.

Computerworld reviewed the Seagate Wireless Plus hard drive and found it was at times difficult to use and limited when it comes to Wi-Fi bandwidth, with only 150Mbps maximum throughput.

Once the wireless connection is lost to the Wireless Plus drive, it does not automatically reconnect. So taking the drive out of range of the Roku box isn’t recommended while video or music is streaming to it.

A Seagate spokesman said the company has updated the firmware on the Wireless Plus, which should address some of the connectivity issues the hardware had in the first iteration.

Lucas Mearian covers consumer data storage, consumerization of IT, mobile device management, renewable energy, telematics/car tech and entertainment tech for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter (@lucasmearian), or subscribe to Lucas’s RSS feed. His email address is lmearian@computerworld.com.