Kaleidescape Hits $2,495 Price Point With Launch of Blu-ray-Quality Streaming Player

Kaleidescape bowed the Alto movie player, which it called the first movie player to import all of its locally stored content from the cloud, by way of the Kaleidescape Store. The Alto brings the entry point of a Kaleidescape system down to $2,495, available through the company’s integrator dealer network. The Alto stores up to 100 movies in Blu-ray quality or 600 movies in DVD quality and can be combined with other Alto players to create up to four viewing zones, the company said. In a Thursday news release, Kaleidescape dealer Franklin Karp, COO of Audio Video Systems, Plainview, New York, said with Alto, the Kaleidescape Store delivers high-quality Blu-ray and DVD movies with support for Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Atmos and DTS-HD Master Audio multichannel soundtracks, something that “streaming devices and services fall well short of.” Kaleidescape’s content library -- numbering 8,500 movies and 1,600 TV shows -- includes titles from Lionsgate, NBCUniversal, Sony and Warner, and is compatible with the UltraViolet solution that enables consumers to stream their purchased video libraries to mobile devices. Kaleidescape didn’t comment about content additions to the Store or the possibility of a direct-to-consumer retail model.