This should have been such a big month for LG. Lots of people were eagerly awaiting information on the up-coming TV & Blu-ray products that , one thought given the press release in September last year, would contain Plex in some shape or form. I for one was eagerly awaiting their Blu-ray announcements. CES a press releases and subsequent blog postings remained confusing to say the least.

The announcement of the SmartTV, a yet to be priced, set-top box includes Plex in the background of their media link software. At the time of writing this there is no news how this is actually done – is content trans-coded from your storage device through Plex media server? What models is the media link actually available on?

I watched the LG presentations at CES eagerly, and thought that I saw a list of LG Blu-ray players when they were talking about the SmartTV software – not just the box they also introduced. However, according to LG Smart TV – Hands on this feature was only going to be on high end TVs. Nightmare I thought.

So I contacted LG directly through their FaceBook fan pages. This is the response.

So another contradiction and more confusion. Still, I was thinking that this is pretty positive. This answer though may prove irrelevant as this morning I heard some terrific news:

XBMC is coming to an Apple near you!

Already available on the first generation Apple TV it is now possible to run XBMC on an ATV2 & iPhone and iPad. As they say in their announcement – “don’t expect to see XBMC in the App Store” however with a little jail-breaking it will be possible to run XBMC on these devices.

via xbmc.org

The most exciting things about this are: the ATV2 is only $99 and full hardware decode for 720p/1080p movies. This is fantastic news. A big thumbs up to Scott Davilla and the other developers and testers that made this possible. Big question now is how to get my hands on an ATV2!!

Further reading:

• Plex announcement
• LG Smart TV – Hands on
• XBMC announcement
• Screenshots and videos