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TV Photo Viewer Released
Oct. 1, 2001

Microsoft's hardware division has entered a new line of business with the US$159 TV Photo Viewer, which lets users view digital images, including converted PowerPoint slides, on a television. Digital imaging and other digital media are an important focus of Microsoft's consumer strategy: better media support is one of the main selling points for Windows XP Home Edition, and the company's eHome division is working on products for sharing digital media with home devices such as TVs and electronic picture frames. The TV Photo Viewer is a small box with a floppy disk drive that plugs into the RCA port available on some TV sets. Bundled PC software allows users to take images from almost any format, change them to JPEGs, edit and optimize them for viewing on a TV screen, and store them as a "slide show" on a floppy disk which users can feed into the Viewer. The Viewer then translates the JPEGs into NTSC signals (the North American TV standard). For more details, see www.microsoft.com/hardware/tvphotoviewer/.