Building/selling HTPC/gaming machines

[tankman1989]

I used to work in the custom home audio/video market and we had this product called Kaliedescape (or something close to that) that started around $20,000. All it was was a fairly simple media server that could only do movies. When you bought a movie it would rip it in entirety and store it on one of the 200GB RAID1 drives (I think they were IDE at that time). If you wanted to add another 200GB it was like $3,000 for the two 200GB hard drives (1000% markup over retail at the time). THe maker got license from movie producers to bypass the encryption so it wasn't breaking any laws.

We lived in a fairly normal county income wise but we sold a number of these systems every year, maybe 5-10 @ $20K+ per year plus a subscription fee. This is some serious money for something very low tech in comparison to a HTPC.

To reason I am telling you this is so that you know what people are/were willing to pay for something. Imagine what you could get for a HTPC that could also do high end gaming as well.

The more I look at the HTPC market the more I see that there isn't much coverage in it, especially a combo market of a HTPC/Gaming rig.

I could easily see someone paying $2,000-3,000 for a machine that would play any PC game and have 3-12GB capacity for movie/music/photo storage plus the ability to surf the net, email and do ANYTHING else PC related.

 

[geeknz]

I'd be interested to read of anyone who has tapped into this niche successfully.

I have always wondered about doing custom builds, but not high-end in particular... could be an interesting one. Plus a heap of fun to build them.

You would want to partner with 'home automation/media' companies that serve the wealthier demographic, to get leads etc.

Certainly food for thought

 

[tankman1989]

I'd be interested to read of anyone who has tapped into this niche successfully.

I have always wondered about doing custom builds, but not high-end in particular... could be an interesting one. Plus a heap of fun to build them.

You would want to partner with 'home automation/media' companies that serve the wealthier demographic, to get leads etc.

Certainly food for thought

I figured that since the average age of the PC gamer is 39, this is a market which could afford a higher end combo unit - the HTPC/gaming system maybe coupled with a nice SAS or NAS storage option if the HTPC case often doesn't provide enough room for numerous internal drives.

Since there is more $ to be made of a higher priced system, the manufacturer would have to produce ewer units to stay in the black.