Western Digital revamps My Cloud

Storage specialists latest offerings to be equipped with Z-Wave wireless technology.

The Plex media streaming & cataloguing service will be available on WD My Cloud NAS devices.

Western Digital has ramped up the features of its home user storage solutions, adding an ability to control sensors and cameras, and beam catalogued home entertainment to smart TVs.

The company that’s traditionally known for its hard disk drives has in recent years moved into offering My Cloud-branded storage devices that home users and businesses use for central storage. It could be for storing workplace documents, or photos, videos and movies at home. Users on the network then securely access that media.

My Cloud devices also serve as central backup devices at home. Most models are not as sophisticated, powerful or feature rich as rival NAS boxes, but they’re relatively easy for mum-and-dad users to set up.

At the IFA consumer tech show in Berlin, Western Digital introduced somewhat more sophisticated features.

It announced that its new WD My Cloud NAS offerings will be equipped with Z-Wave, a wireless technology used by some brands of connected home devices such as lights, home appliances, entertainment and access control systems.

It’s a bid to make My Cloud boxes an essential part of the connected home.

Further, it has forged a deal with the video surveillance platform Milestone Arcus for My Cloud boxes to offer easy-to-manage surveillance solutions, such as running surveillance cameras dotted around an office environment. The service will be available in My Cloud business series NAS boxes.

A third deal should be of great interest to those with large personal collections of videos, movies, TV shows, music, and photos. WD announced a deal with Plex which creates beautifully formatted catalogues of home collections.

Plex adds images, movie and TV show descriptions to media you store at home, as well as access to ever-growing series of streamed media such as TED talk series. Plex then streams it to your TVs, smart phones and tablets at home, and even to your devices away from home.

The Plex media streaming & cataloguing service will be available on WD My Cloud NAS devices.

My Cloud devices will now act as Plex servers, which means users can access their personal media with movies and TV show episodes stored on WD devices and catalogue by Plex from the smart TVs. Many new smart TV models are Plex compatible.

Plex is itself going from strength to strength with millions of users globally, and at IFA claimed a take up rate of around 300,000 new users per month.

One problem however, has been the inability of smaller and slower NAS boxes to transcode movies and video - that is, to crunch the media into a form that can be streamed to different sizes and styles of devices, such as phones and tablets, while streaming takes place.

So at IFA, Plex announced a “Plex Media Optimiser”, inbuilt software that will quietly go through your media collection and create versions suitable for streaming to different types of devices ahead of time. For NAS boxes with small processors, this could take days, but it means they too can be Plex servers.

And that means the not-so-powerful My Cloud boxes can be Plex servers too.

The better solution is for NAS manufacturers to put more powerful processors in their storage devices, which companies such as Taiwan-based Synology are doing already. They can “crunch” your media as it is streamed.

The new WD NAS features will be available straight away on My Cloud DL2100 and DL2200 devices. Like other NAS solution providers, WD will charge you for each surveillance camera that you set up with its system, although it will throw in the first two camera licenses for free.

At its media conference at IFA, Panasonic announced what it said was the world’s first 4G remote monitoring camera, called Nubo. It operates with the SIM card, and doesn’t require a Wi-Fi connection. It’s compatible with 2G, 3G and 4G LTE, and connects to Panasonic’s own cloud based service.

Significantly, it announced it had forged a deal with insurance company ALLIANZ which will offer a service that notifies you of problems detected by your Nubo camera.

The deal applies only to Europe at this time, but it does illustrate the potential for insurance companies to become directly involved in offering home security services.

Maybe in future, we’ll get a few dollars knocked off our home contents policy, if we agree to take part in such a scheme. We can but dream.