Seagate Freeagent Go Flex TV streaming player

Seagate’s Freeagent Go Flex TV is a little black box that connects to your television and allows you to listen to digital music files through the TV’s speakers or view digital photos and movies on screen. It’s a good way to free those files from the PC at your desk to the living room or bedroom.

As with other devices of this type, there are two main ways of doing this, either by playing files stored on a USB storage device or by streaming them from your PC over the home network. The Go Flex TV also offers a more unusual third option. Under the front panel lurks an empty bay, into which you can insert a hard disk.

Unfortunately the bay is specifically designed for Seagate’s own Go Flex portable disks (£75 for a 500GB model – click here for our review). Other than looking neat, however, the Go Flex disk option is far from a necessity. You will get exactly the same performance from any other USB hard disk or memory key.

Setting up the streaming side of things was very easy if your home network is already set up, though it doesn’t work with wireless networks – the connection must be wired. Similarly, connecting it to a TV was pretty straightforward, especially so if the telly has a spare HDMI socket, which carries digital audio as well as video (though, annoyingly, there’s no HDMI cable provided in the box).

An optical audio output is also available for those with home cinema amplifiers or speaker systems, while cables for lower quality analogue connections are included.

Support for different files, formats and resolutions is impressive. High-definition video files at resolutions of up to 1080p can be played back on the TV (as long the TV supports high definition).

In our tests the Go Flex TV played everything we threw at it, except for some DRM-protected music. The device will also stream from selected online services, including Youtube and Picasa. You will definitely need a network connection for this, however.

The Go Flex TV is an impressive device that is unfortunately hampered by a couple of usability issues.

The supplied remote control unit was cheap looking and unresponsive, for example. Even worse is the user interface, which is sluggish and crude. On both counts we would expect more from a product costing £100.