SanDisk Kills TakeTV, Nobody Notices

SanDisk killed TakeTV and its related content portal Fanfare May 15 according to NewTeeVee, and no one noticed.

For the 99.99999999999% of people who have never heard of Fanfare and TakeTV, the Fanfare portal allowed users to download content including television shows and films onto their personal computers for transfer onto the TakeTV device, that was then be manually taken from the PC to a special docking device attached to a TV for viewing.

I first wrote about TakeTV in October 2007 where I held back in saying that “SanDisk has a rather liberal view of the word simplify” and “in a networked world it’s more than a little bit bizarre that a product such as this requires manual transportation from A to B.” What I really wanted to say is that this is perhaps one of the stupidest things I had seen in 2007. In 1997 this would have been amazing, but in an age of networked devices such as AppleTV, why would users want to buy a device that involved having to manually take what was essentially a thumb drive to a special device connected to their TV?

TakeTV joins the Dodo’s as another victim of ubiquitous internet and network enabled devices.