Press Release Kaleidescape Introduces the New Strato M Movie Player (Entry Level Movie Player) (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

Kaleidescape Introduces the New Strato M Movie Player



Kaleidescape’s Entry-Level Movie Player, Redefined



MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA – April 2, 2025 – Kaleidescape, maker of the ultimate movie platform, today announced Strato M, a new entry-level movie player for residential, marine, and commercial theatre systems. Offered at half the price of Kaleidescape’s previous lowest-cost system, Strato M provides reference 2K video output, with better than Blu-ray quality. Like all Kaleidescape movie players, Strato M supports lossless audio.



“Strato M opens up the Kaleidescape experience to a broader range of movie enthusiasts,” said Tayloe Stansbury, chairman & CEO of Kaleidescape. “And in larger systems, Strato M is great for secondary rooms, while reserving the flagship Strato V for main viewing areas.”



Strato M works on its own or as part of a larger Kaleidescape system. As a standalone system, Strato M provides a single playback zone that holds a half-dozen movies on an internal solid-state drive – downloading a movie in about ten minutes over gigabit Ethernet. It features a streamlined interface, optimized for navigating a small movie library, offering automatic offloading of watched movies 48 hours after playback to make room for more movies. Purchased movies can be re-downloaded at any time.



Strato M can also be grouped with Terra Prime movie servers to increase movie storage. This returns Strato M’s interface to the full Kaleidescape user experience. Strato V, Strato C, and Strato M movie players can all be grouped together with one or more Terra movie servers, to fit your entertainment needs.



Strato M supports lossless multi-channel and spatial object-based audio, including Dolby Atmos and DTS:X. Strato M supports reference 2K video, with higher bit rates and bit depths than Blu-ray, including Dolby Vision, HDR10, BT.2020, and 4:2:2 chroma.



Kaleidescape Strato M provides access to the Kaleidescape movie store, the world’s only digital movie collection with lossless audio and full reference video quality. The movie store offers thousands of 4K and HD titles for purchase or rent, including movies, TV series, and concerts. Kaleidescape movies are downloaded, not streamed, so there is never buffering or loss in quality.



To learn more, visit: https://www.kaleidescape.com/strato-m-movie-player/. Strato M is available now through authorized Kaleidescape dealers: https://www.kaleidescape.com/find-a-dealer/.

 

[Sam Posten]

A 1080p streamer for $2k. These guys are nuts

 

[Ronald Epstein]

A 1080p streamer for $2k. These guys are nuts

I have never remotely considered a Kaleidescape, as it's so insanely expensive.

However, the feedback I hear from anyone who owns one is that they love it.

 

[DaveF]

This is not a product for home users. This is for yachts equipped with HD screens.

Because no home user who can afford a Kaleidascape is still stuck viewing HD.

Luxury Marine Movie Service for Private Yachts - Kaleidescape

Make your time at sea more enjoyable! We provide the finest full-fidelity movie selection for private yachts to create the ultimate luxury marine movie experience.

www.kaleidescape.com

 

[Sam Posten]

This is not a product for home users. This is for yachts equipped with HD screens.

Because no home user who can afford a Kaleidascape is still stuck viewing HD.

Luxury Marine Movie Service for Private Yachts - Kaleidescape

Make your time at sea more enjoyable! We provide the finest full-fidelity movie selection for private yachts to create the ultimate luxury marine movie experience.

www.kaleidescape.com

Which means this is a product that should have been announced yesterday, not today. Who is this for? Rich people with bad eyesight?

 

[DaveF]

This is for the millionaires, not the billionaires.

Who has big bucks that would want an HD streamer? This makes no sense at all for a residential consumer product. Seems to me the likely answer is yachts with AV systems installed a decade ago and they’re still HD and they’re <32” screens in the rooms. So install an HD movie system for a few grand, and it’s fine and cheaper than upgrading the entire AV system.

 

[DaveF]

But it's fun watching people on forums cling to the notion that K-scape is foremost a consumer product and try to understand this from that view.

It's like trying to understand Dell and HP while pretending they don't have massive corporate buyers who wants lots of identical laptops for cheap.

 

[Sam Posten]

For $2000 you can buy a 54” 4k OLED, an AppleTV 4k and hundreds of 4k with Atmos movies. Or an empty Strato M.

It doesn’t even make sense if you have the money to buy it on a whim.

 

[John Dirk]

Seems to me this company releases products intended to entice the home enthusiast but with a lack of understanding concerning who we really are. As enthusiasts, we aren't going to settle for a crippled player that essentially renders our existing 4K infrastructure useless, just because it has a lower price point. If they really want to appeal to knowledgeable home users this player needs to be fully 4K capable at a minimum and should also have more built-in storage. If and when that happens I'd be happy to consider it. Until then, I'll stick with Plex or similar.

 

[DaveF]

Seems to me this company releases products intended to entice the home enthusiast but with a lack of understanding concerning who we really are. As enthusiasts, we aren't going to settle for a crippled player that essentially renders our existing 4K infrastructure useless, just because it has a lower price point. If they really want to appeal to knowledgeable home users this player needs to be fully 4K capable at a minimum and should also have more built-in storage. If and when that happens I'd be happy to consider it. Until then, I'll stick with Plex or similar.

I think K-scape knows who their customers are and sells very effectively to them.

The problem is that home-enthusiast websites keep touting k-scape products as if they’re for the broad membership, when they’re not.

But maybe I’m wrong, and K really does believe this is an exciting new entry level product, closing the price gap for normal enthusiasts. In which case they clearly have just lost the plot and will be sold off for IP scraps in a year or two.

 

[DaveF]

I don’t even know who Kaleidascape’s market is now. I anticipated shifting to MoviesAnywhere long term. Except why bother paying $30 for a full movie when I just stream as part of my ongoing subscription services?

And if I’m middle-aged and finally have the money to buy the K-scape, then I’ve got a huge disc collection and I’m not starting anew with $10k hardware purchase to then re-buy all my movies digitally at $30 a pop.

And if I’m an affluent 20-something, I’m watching YouTube, not buying discs or digital movies.

I really think Kaleidascape is for the 7-figure income households, for whom proportionally buying this kit is like buying a disc player is for the rest of us. There are a lot of upper income people in American and a company can make a tidy business selling to them.

But where does this high-price, low-end product live? I think it’s for corporate installs where it’s still sensible to have an HD distribution entertainment system than to go all in on 4K. Because it makes no sense at all as an “entry level” product. Unless, going back to the start of this pointlessly long diatribe K-scape management is now brain dead.

 

[John Dirk]

I think K-scape knows who their customers are and sells very effectively to them.

The problem is that home-enthusiast websites keep touting k-scape products as if they’re for the broad membership, when they’re not.

But maybe I’m wrong, and K really does believe this is an exciting new entry level product, closing the price gap for normal enthusiasts. In which case they clearly have just lost the plot and will be sold off for IP scraps in a year or two.

I don't know. This article suggests, perhaps, the opposite. I hadn't heard any of this before and haven't gone through the trouble to fact check it.

I also suspect they're happy and involved in the way they're being spun in the enthusiast community, a market they'd clearly love to crack. In any case, this product appears to be yet another "miss" on their part. Maybe they should see if they can get Gary Yacoubian to head up their product development.

 

[DaveF]

That article is nearly a decade old.

 

[John Dirk]

That article is nearly a decade old.

Right and thus the disclaimer. I don't know what's really going on over there.

I didn't include this before because I'm not a business or finance guy and don't fully understand it. Thoughts?

My suspicion is this company is on life support and desperately needs a new customer base. Sadly, they seem to have no idea how to cultivate one.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

A 1080p streamer for $2k. These guys are nuts

When I clicked on the link, it was $4000, which is insane. At that price, why wouldn’t you just buy the best 4K disc player on the market, which is about $1000, and pocket the $3000 savings for discs? Or an AppleTV 4K box for $200 and call it a day?

The specs indicate that it does 2K, but also with HDR. There are no regular/readily available displays out there that are 1080p with HDR, that’s not the consumer spec - HDR comes with 4K displays. So, if you’re someone with a 1080p display, a device that specializes in 1080p with HDR is pointless, and if you’re someone with a 4K HDR display, feeding it a 2K source when the same content is more readily and inexpensively available in 4K is also pointless.

This looks like a product designed for unscrupulous professional installers/high end showrooms to pawn off on unsuspecting customers. A solution in search of a problem.

 

[DaveF]

A 1080p streamer for $2k. These guys are nuts

When I clicked on the link, it was $4000, which is insane. At that price, why wouldn’t you just buy the best 4K disc player on the market, which is about $1000, and pocket the $3000 savings for discs? Or an AppleTV 4K box for $200 and call it a day?

The specs indicate that it does 2K, but also with HDR. There are no regular/readily available displays out there that are 1080p with HDR, that’s not the consumer spec - HDR comes with 4K displays. So, if you’re someone with a 1080p display, a device that specializes in 1080p with HDR is pointless, and if you’re someone with a 4K HDR display, feeding it a 2K source when the same content is more readily and inexpensively available in 4K is also pointless.

This looks like a product designed for unscrupulous professional installers/high end showrooms to pawn off on unsuspecting customers. A solution in search of a problem.

I've not seen any actual pricing for the device, and it's not listed on the production page, so I don't know whether either of you got your price numbers.

But given the 4K V is $4000, $2000 for the "low cost" M seems plausible.

 

[JohnRice]

Personally, I suspect that K-Scape is aimed at the market that is enamored with technology and toys others don't have. Not really at film buffs, or even for actual enjoyment of the content it brings them. That seems to be a surprisingly large market these days. I'm definitely not one, though. For me, electronic hardware is a means to a purpose, not the purpose itself.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I've not seen any actual pricing for the device, and it's not listed on the production page, so I don't know whether either of you got your price numbers.

I clicked on the press release on the first post, and then the link to buy at retailers from the website the press release directed me to, and went to Best Buy - but perhaps I’m looking at the wrong model.

 

[DaveF]

Right and thus the disclaimer. I don't know what's really going on over there.

I didn't include this before because I'm not a business or finance guy and don't fully understand it. Thoughts?

My suspicion is this company is on life support and desperately needs a new customer base. Sadly, they seem to have no idea how to cultivate one.

Could be. As I said, I don't know who the market for K-scape is these days except for the top affluent, rich and wealthy. (And the really hardcore enthusiasts who decide that a $10,000 digital movie kit really is their mid-life crisis dream purchase. I mean, I get it, the Kaleidascape is pretty awesome, and if I all I watched were movies, I can imagine splurging on one as a midlife crisis buy.)

I tend to think they are the dog that caught the car: having somehow negotiated the impossible and got digital movie file ownership for the customers, they never figured out how to make it into a self-sustaining business. The easy guess is that deal comes with such a high cost both cash and hardware DRM, that it can't ever be made profitably mass market.

And now, nearly 20 years into their business, the market for buying full quality movies, disc or otherwise, is dying to the simplicity and affordability of subscription services run by the tech oligopoly.

 

[DaveF]

I clicked on the press release on the first post, and then the link to buy at retailers from the website the press release directed me to, and went to Best Buy - but perhaps I’m looking at the wrong model.

You're looking at the Strato V, their "low cost" 4K player for $3995. BestBuy nor AudioAdvice don't list this new Strato M.