AMD announced details of their Live! PC initiative earlier this week. Similar to Intel’s Viiv initiative, the AMD Live! program is a way to mold PC’s into home consumer appliances similar to TiVo and Cable set top boxes. The basic difference between Viiv and Live! center around how the two companies approach digital content. While Intel has embraced several high end content providers that are of course security enabled, AMD has decided to embrace DRM-free content in mind. So what is Live! right now? It’s just a bunch of specifications for a PC that’s designed for the home living room environment. It’s also a set of free applications that are basically rebranded third party applications. A Live! PC should have at least a dual core AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor running at 4200+ or higher. It must also support Cool’n'Quiet and also support Microsoft’s Away Mode found in UR2 of Windows Media Center 2005.

Application wise, AMD will be providing additional programs for Live! enabled PCs including:

• Live On Demand which is basically Orb Networks on demand video app
• Live! Compress which is a way to reduce file sizes of television shows
• Live! Network Magic which is basically a rebranded app from Pure Networks
• Live! LogMein which is a rebranded version of LogMein
• Live! Media Vault – a service from StreamLoad which backs up user’s files to an online store space

Check out this PC Mag article for more details.
[Check it out]

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