Mobile App & Trailers are CEDIA Standouts for Kaleidescape

In addition to the company’s striking new booth and demo surround system, Kaleidescape wowed CEDIA attendees by demonstrating two exciting new features—a mobile app and streaming trailers.

The Kaleidescape mobile app is in beta testing and currently limited to iOS devices, but will be available for Android in the future. The app received rave reviews at the show, bringing the best-in-class Kaleidescape user experience to a new platform.

Owners now have instant access to the Movie Store whenever they have an Internet connection. Movies can be browsed in a variety of ways, including sorting by title or theatrical release date or filtering by Rotten Tomatoes Fresh-rated or titles available for pre-order. Browsing can also be done by genre or within Kaleidescape’s curated collections. You can search by a specific title, actor, director, or genre, and the iPhone’s microphone is available for rapid entry.

Selecting a title shows all pertinent details of the film, including cast and crew, available resolution, if there’s a Dolby Atmos or DTS:X soundtrack, Rotten Tomatoes and Common Sense Media ratings, as well as all extras and languages. There is also a Watch Trailer option, which lets you preview a trailer instantly on your mobile device. Purchasing is fast, and is secured by either a thumbprint or face ID, with the download immediately starting (or added to your queue). With a fast Internet connection, you will be able to buy a movie before starting your commute home and have it ready once you arrive.

The mobile app’s remote function offers a fun new way to operate your system. You will now have complete control over your Kaleidescape collection in the palm of your hand, with the ability to search your collection to quickly find a title, actor, or genre. And you will have instant access to the list, covers, and collections view, and can jump to the system menu or to the onscreen Movie Store.

Exhibiting the thoughtful design common to all Kaleidescape products, the app features a trackpad section for navigating the onscreen interface via up/down/left/right-select without needing to take your eyes off the screen to hunt for small buttons. And haptic feedback lets you feel that a command has been sent.

Lastly, a push notification can be sent when new movies become available, a pre-order is ready, or a download has finished. Of course, users can selectively opt out of receiving any notifications.

If you’re interested in beta testing the mobile app, please send an e-mail to beta@kaleidescape.com from the e-mail address associated with your Kaleidescape movie store account, with the subject line: “mobile app beta”.

The second big reveal at CEDIA was the ability to stream trailers directly from the Internet. Unsure if you want to own a movie, want to see a title that looks interesting, or just want to revisit an old favorite? The Play Trailer option gives instant access to viewing the trailer, greatly enhancing the onscreen Movie Store browsing experience, with trailers available for nearly every movie. The Movie Guide Team has also added the ability to play a trailer for virtually every movie already in your collection. Since most new Blu-ray and UHD quality movies don’t include a trailer as part of their features, this returns a much-loved feature to owners’ systems.

Beyond just being a terrific enhancement that makes it even more fun to browse the onscreen store, the trailer feature is a first since Kaleidescape has never streamed content before. Kaleidescape is using trailers from a third party, and is reviewing all of them to ensure that they’re of sufficient quality. Currently, the third-party company is transcoding the trailers at bit rates of between 2 to 5 Mbps, but Kaleidescape will eventually transcode all trailers in-house in the 10 Mbps range, improving both audio and video quality.

As with all of Kaleidescape’s kOS upgrades, both the mobile app and trailers will be added to capable systems free of charge in an upcoming, automatic software release.