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Let’s say you were spending tens of thousands of dollars to build yourself a fancy home theater. How would you go about actually watching movies in it? While you could always set up a Roku or Apple TV box to stream on, they’re not going to feel all that theatrical. Most streaming devices are too bogged down with banner ads and obnoxious upsells, and the streaming services themselves compromise on audiovisual quality for the sake of smoother streaming. Maybe what you actually need is a device that explicitly caters to videophiles with obsessively-manicured home theater setups. That’s what Kaleidescape has been trying to accomplish for the past two decades. This small companywith roughly 54 employees across its Mountain View headquarters and engineering offices in Waterloohas made a name for itself among A/V diehards with its eye-poppingly expensive video players, which combine the convenience of digital delivery with Blu-ray quality. Just as notable, though, is its unfussy movie player software, which clears away all the cruft of modern streaming platforms to focus on the films themselves. “What we’re aiming at is trying to get you to an experience that is as close to the director’s intent as you possibly can get,” says Tayloe Stansbury, Kaleidescape’s CEO and chairman. Tayloe Stansbury [Photo: Kaleidescape] The cost of near-cinema quality doesn’t come cheap, at $4,000 for Kaleidescape’s entry-level Strato V Movie Player. But believe it or not, this is the start of Kaleidescape’s attempt to move down-market, having previously charged upwards of $10,000 for its hardware (plus the cost to purchase movies at about $20 apiece). Stansbury, a former Intuit CTO who took the helm at Kaleidescape after getting hooked on the system himself, says he’s on a mission to revitalize the company and reach new audiences after years of stagnant product development. But if that’s the goal, Kaleidescape may eventually need to reckon with the streaming business models it’s spent all these years rejecting. [Photo: Kaleidescape] Hi-fi movies Unlike most TV boxes you can buy today, Kaleidescape does not work with any streaming services or come with a free catalog of ad-supported content. After setting up the Strato V, you are presented with a sparse menu system for downloading movieseither for purchase or rentaland watching them. And “downloading” is the correct term, as Kaleidescape does not believe in the vagaries of streaming. Each film takes about 10 minutes to acquire over a gigabit wired ethernet connectionno Wi-Fi allowedat which point it will play back even if the system’s offline. No other streaming platform supports that unless you’re on a mobile device. “When you play it, it’s perfect every single time,” Stansbury says. But the main differentiator is the quality of the content itself. While Kaleidescape gets the same source files from studios as every other digital movie store, it’s not in the business of seeing how much compression it can get away with. The company encodes video files at an average 65 Mbps, versus 12 Mbps to 30 Mbps for other services according to FlatpanelsHD, and it delivers lossless audio at 6 Mbps, matching or exceeding the quality of 4K Blu-ray discs with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. Kaleidescape is also obsessive about finding issues in its video files through human review, and will either request updates from the studio or apply its own transcoding coding changes to address them. (Stansbury says the company’s record number of revisions for a single film is 92.) “It doesn’t matter if you’re on an inexpensive TV with no soundbar, or you’re in a million dollar theater, it will look and sound better when you feed it with high fidelity content,” he says. The result is sort of like listening to a CD instead of a lossy MP3 file: There are folks who will insist the difference is night and day, others who will never notice, and a third group that feels better on some gut level about having a pristine version either way. I probably fall into the third category. Kaleidescape loaned a Strato V to review for this story, and I made my eyes numb looking for barely-perceptible differences between Kaleidescape’s films and their 4K HDR streaming counterparts. On my Samsung QD-OLED TV, the colors in Mad Max: Fury Road seemed more natural than the on-demand version from Amazon, and maybe the audio was a little clearer, but was I just fooling myself? Hard to say. There was, however, one obvious improvement: Kaleidescape does a better job with subtitles. Its version of Parasite, for instance, used a much nicer font with no black background like Netflix’s version, and certain translated phrases made more sense (like “check WhatsApp” instead of “check the messenger”). Even more noticeable, at least to me as a longtime reviewer of streaming players, was the straightforward nature of Kaleidescape’s interface, which in a way it scratches the same simplistic itch as an iPod for music. There’s a row of recommended movie purchases at the top, a row of downloaded movies underneath, additional rows for movies-in-progress and favorites, and that’s it. The absence of distraction stands in sharp contrast to every modern streaming platform. Sometimes the sparseness can be vexing. There’s no voice searchat least not without dictating into Kaleidescape’s smartphone remote appand the infrared remote requires line-of-sight to the box. But the system has some niceties as well, like the collection of popular scenes you can jump to in each film and the integration with Lutron, which allows for home automation in response to certain video queues, such as raising the lights when the credits start rolling. Those kinds of experiences have made Kaeidescape a favorite among A/V installers, says John Sciacca, who covered Kaleidescape extensively as a contributing editor for Sound & Vision and works as a partner at an installer in South Carolina. “Everybody wants it,” Sciacca says. “You might not want to pay for it, but you would love to own it. And there’s not too many things out there that deliver that kind of an experience.” Cheating death Kaleidescape didn’t start off in the movie download business. Its first product, which launched in 2003, was a $30,000 video server that made digital copies of users’ DVDs and played them all through single menu system. Bloggers mocked the concept. (“If that’s not worth selling a kidney, we don’t know what is,” Engadget‘s Paul Miller wrote in 2006.) But Kaleidescape won over home theater enthusiasts, who marveled at how it made sense of their DVD collections. It even skipped the FBI warnings and other annoyances that DVD viewers had to sit through. “The experience was just better,” says Josh Goldman, a longtime owner who runs the independent Kaleidescape Owners Forum. “You could instantly sort and find other movies you wanted. You could find related movies to the one you just liked. You couldn’t really do that with a rack of DVDs in their cases.” But there was a problem: The DVD Copy Control Association took issue with Kaleidescape’s digital copies, which had no way of ensuring that users still owned their original DVDs and weren’t sharing them. The group sued Kaleidescape in 2005 and eventually prevailed after seven years of court battles. A settlement in 2014 allowed existing customers to keep using their systems, but barred Kaleidescape from selling any new systems with DVD ripping capabilities. The lawsuit took its toll on Kaleidescape, which also ran into manufacturing problems developing a new Blu-ray-based product around the same time. In 2016, the company almost shut down, with then-CEO Cheena Srinivasan blaming the lawsuit for “millions of dollars in legal fees and years of lost focus” before it secured an equity funding round to stay alive. Sciacca says the company’s brush with death helped accelerate its pivot toward digital distribution, which had began several years earlier. With new funding and no more legal clouds, it was able to make more deals with movie studios. “Kaleidescape was founded on disc-based importing,” he says. “The lawsuit paved the way for Kaleidescape 2.0, but also kind of put an end to Kaleidescape 1.0.” [Photo: Kaleidescape] Making moves Stansbury wound up in control of Kaleidescape for somewhat selfish reasons. He acquired his first system in 2011, on the recommendation of an A/V dealer who was overhauling his home theater. Although he fell in love with the product, he wound up getting frustrated with some gaps in the movie catalog and had some ideas on how to revamp the product line. He reached out to Kaleidescape, offering to make introductions with his contacts in Hollywood, which led to him becoming an investor in the company before taking the helm outright in 2020. “I was annoyed with some decisions that were made about product roadmaps, and I called them up to grump about those,” he says. “And eventually that developed into meeting the chairman and being asked to take over leadership of the company.” Stansbury points to a few things Kaleidescape has done since then. Beyond shipping the Strato V, the company has released new server products with higher storage capacities, and it’s made a foray into B2B with a server product for movie theaters. The idea is that exhibitors can use Kaleidescape for quick, flexible access to back-catalog films at high quality instead of arranging for delivery from studios. “What we’ve done is cranked out a whole new bunch of products,” Stansbury says. “We’ve got a whole bunch of new products I won’t talk to you about that are in the pipeline for the future, and we’ve also been steadily growing revenue and improving the financial picture for the company as well.” Sciacca, who was close with former CEO Cheena Srinivasan, says that while Srinivasan was more engineering-focused, Stansbury brings more of a business sensibility. “Tayloe, the new CEO, I think he came in with different business ideas, and infusion of capital, and, you know, ‘Fortune 500-think’ on how to run a company,” he says. (Kaleidescape declined to make its former leadership available for interviews.) Sticking to the past Back in 2016, when Kaleidescape narrowly avoided shutting down, Sciacca wrote a story for Sound & Vision wondering if home media server products could survive in the streaming age. Kaleidescape had outlasted a wave of competitorsXperinet MIRV, Sunfire Theater Grand Media Player, Leviton LEAPS, among othersbut could never truly compete with streaming’s convenience. He’s more optimistic now, but believes the price needs to come down further. “At the end of the day, if you if you want to buy and watch movies, there’s a lot of cheaper ways to do it,” he says. But going further down-market won’t be easy. Kaleidescape’s movie prices$25 for new-release films, $8 for a typical rentalis not much higher than other streaming platforms. Stansbury says Kaleidescape customers are surprisingly sensitive about movie prices, so it builds the cost of its ongoing engineering work into the hardware. He’s unsure whether Kaleidescape could adopt a subscription model that brings in ongoing revenue. “Financially, I’d love that, but that doesn’t seem to be where our customers’ heads are at,” he says. “They tend to be more of an ownership mindset.” Even so, Josh Goldman, who runs the Kaleidescpe Owner’s Forum, believes the company should move to a cloud-based system. The Strato V can only store 10 movies at a time, so customers have to either constantly re-download films or tack on another server, starting at $5,000. While his forum is more active now than it once was, he believes the number of people willing to install expensive server systems in their home is shrinking, and home internet speeds are now fast enough to keep up with Kaleidescape’s bitrates. “That’s got to be the ultimate survival plan for the company to maintain and deliver the best movie shopping, delivery, and playback experience,” he says. “It can’t be about storage in the home. It’s obviously got to go away.” Beyond just chasing lower prices, Kaleidescape faces a more existential challenge: Increasingly the content people want to watch at home can’t be bought on digital video stores. If you want to watch Severance, you need Apple TV+. If you want to watch Squid Game, you need Netflix. Those shows aren’t available on Kaleidescape at all. Stansbury says he’s had conversations with streamers about potentially selling high-fidelity versions of their streaming exclusives. And in some cases, that content is co-developed with a traditional studio, in which case it does eventually become available to purchase a year or two after release. But he also points out that Kaleidescape’s focus on movies is becoming a bigger advantage as the DVD and Blu-ray business dry up. Best Buy, Walmart, and Target have all stopped selling physical media, and fewer movies are coming out on disc in the first place. Major streaming platforms, meanwhile, don’t even offer Blu-ray quality as an option. “The only way to get that is through Kaleidescape, so it does put us in an increasingly unique position,” Stansbury says. So maybe Kaleidescape doesn’t need to adapt to the streaming world, because it’s survived this long playing a different game entirely. Whatever happens next, enthusiasts like Goldman aren’t betting against it. “Our laser disc player is gone, our VCRs are gone, even our TiVo is gone,” he says. “Everything has changed, but Kaleidescape, remarkably, has been a consistent part of our home video watching for 20 years, which really is amazing.”
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E-Commerce
Johnstown, Pennsylvaniawhich has been battered by floods and economic declineis one of the poorest cities in the state, and its schools rely heavily on federal funding to serve its students. Nearly a third of the Greater Johnstown School Districts budget came from federal dollars in 2023, funding everything from safer classrooms to career and technical programs in auto body work, welding, and cosmetology. But the federal funding benefiting Johnstowns public schools may be in jeopardy if the Trump administrations plans to eliminate the Department of Education come to pass. Last week, the department laid off nearly half of its staff, signaling that the president is serious about his campaign promise to eliminate the agency. Nancy Weaver Behe, who teaches cosmetology at Greater Johnstown High School, said the loss of federal support would come as a blow to kids that already must contend with poverty and a lot of hardships. The career education the school provides helps them stay motivated, she said. At a campaign rally last fall not far from Johnstown in Indiana, Pennsylvania, then-candidate Donald Trump said eliminating the Department of Education would allow him to move education back to the states. But education is already largely the domain of states, which set curricula, establish academic standards, and determine teacher certification requirements as well as graduation and testing benchmarks for students. States and local governments also provide public schools with a lions share of their funding. Just a fraction of public school funds13.6% nationwide as of fiscal year 2022come from the federal government. Still, the Department of Education plays a critically important role in the education of underserved students, said Deborah Gordon Klehr, executive director of the Education Law Center in Pennsylvania. The main vehicle for helping struggling students is Title I, a federal program that provides extra funding to schools with high numbers of low-income students. Those schools are typically in communities with lower property values, which limits the revenue they can generate through local property taxesthe primary source of school funding. Title I helps so many students that are in dire circumstances and that need extra help in reading and math, said Weaver Behe, who is the president for the central-western region of the Pennsylvania State Education Association. Title I funds supportive services, like teacher aides, learning specialists and reading and math intervention. Weaver Behe worries that the Education Department now lacks the staff to ensure those programs are funded. And if the worst happens and funding from the department is eliminated, she wondered aloud, How do we adjust to make up for nearly a third of our budget? Trump can’t unilaterally eliminate programs like Title I, as they’re enshrined in federal law and require congressional action to be dismantled. But Project 2025, which opens its education chapter with a call to eliminate the Department of Education, may offer an indication of Trumps legislative agenda. Project 2025 proposed transforming Title I and federal special education funding into no-strings-attached block grants, allowing states to continue the programsor redirect education dollars elsewhere. Its unlikely the state could make up for any gaps if federal dollars are lost. As of 2022, Pennsylvania ranked 42nd in the country in share of state spending on education. In fact, Pennsylvanias Commonwealth Court recently ruled that the state did not meet a constitutional requirement to fund a quality education system, and ordered the state to overhaul it through adequate investment. Pennsylvania schools very much depend on the federal government, said Marc Stier, executive director of the Pennsylvania Policy Center. K-12 schools in the state receive about $1.6 billion in federal education dollars out of a total $36 billion budget. At a little more than 4% of total revenue, thats not a lot of money, Stier said, but its critical money. That funding, said Aaron Chapin, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association and a middle school teacher in Stroudsburg, is targeted toward our most vulnerable students. While the bulk of federal funding in Johnstown is intended for students from low-income families, other federal funding streams support students learning English or those in special education classrooms. In Philadelphia, Marsena Toney is an autistic support specialist at John Story Jenks Academy for Arts and Sciences. In her special education classroom, there may be three or four professional aides supporting as many as eight students, who all have different needs and behavioral concerns, Toney said. For example, some aides may offer hands-on assistance with writing activities because a child cant hold a pencil independently. Others provide speech and occupational therapy and even assist students with using the restroom. And adequate support for students in need can be costly. Teachers already have to [buy supplies] out of pocket to aid in their day-to-day teaching, Toney said. She purchases science materials, fidget toys to aid with focus, and calming supports for when her students get frustrated or overwhelmed. If funding for special education classes were reduced and her students expected to learn in a general education classroom, the complex needs Toney must address in a single day would be very difficult to manage. With the prospect of reduced federal funding on the horizon, Chapin said teachers are nervous about a possible future of overcrowded classrooms and students not getting the services they need. Its going to affect our kids, he said, but its going to affect all of our communities. By Kalena Thomave, Capital & Main This piece was originally published by Capital & Main, which reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.
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E-Commerce
When people talk about work-life balance, they often mean that they have some engagement with activities outside of worknot just filling the hours of the day when they’re not working. That engagement might involve taking care of family members, engaging as a volunteer, or participating in a hobby. If youre fortunate enough to have the time to spend on a hobby, does it matter what you do? Perhaps any activity you engage in outside of work is likely to lift your spirits. But research suggests that different activities affect your overall happiness in different ways. The power of movement In particular, hobbies that enable you to be active make you happier than those that involve less movement. So, participating in sports or physical activity (even relatively mild activity) makes you happier, as does engaging in activities that involve some travel (like visiting significant buildings) or engaging in active creative pursuits like dancing or singing. In contrast, more sedate activities like going to the movies or theater or reading a book have no strong influence on happiness overall. What is going on here? For one thing, physical activity helps to keep you healthy. The more you move and stay fit, the more you are likely to continue to stay healthy and fit later in life. So, the activities themselves are enjoyable, and they have a positive impact on factors like health that have a positive effect on well-being. Moreover, many of these activities are actively social. A lot of sports require engaging with other people. In addition, a lot of active creative pursuits and travel are done in social groups. Humans are a social species, and so our motivational system and our emotional state thrive when we are around at least a small number of other people. Finding the right hobby for you The hobbies that dont have much impact on well-being are those that are primarily done while seated and are not particularly social. Reading is typically done alone, though you might ultimately talk about a book with friends. You might go to a theater with friends to see a play or watch a movie, but you actually participate in that activity sitting quietly in the dark. Of course, there are lots of reasons to engage in hobbies. You might want a diversion from your work. You might want to do something relaxing. However, the data suggest that if your goal for taking up a hobby is to be happier and feel more satisfied with life, then staying physically and socially active is likely to be your best bet.
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E-Commerce
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