Twonky Beam Browser review

Although home media players are growing in popularity, the concept is still a bit on the techie side for most DVD-owning folk to appreciate. Scary-sounding terms like UPnP and DLNA are thrown around and precise reasons and methods for hooking up your TV to your home network is massively unclear.

These media players, for one thing, don't generally accept any physical media, which makes you wonder why they're called media players. But when you get your head around the notion of storing your music, videos, photos and other digital multimedia files in one location (on a computer, or networked hard drive), and then accessing them using a media player device from anywhere else in the house, it all begins to fall in place.

Almost as a side-effect of being on your home network, these media players are adjacent to simple Internet access because they connect to the same router as your broadband modem, or computer. Apps like Twonky Beam Browser are becoming increasingly popular for providing a neat, handheld service for routing online content from sites like YouTube to your media player, exactly as though it was coming from your network storage location.

Twonky Beam Browser is very good at what it does, particularly for those who are only just finding their way in the connected media player minefield. For one thing, it automatically picks up any compatible media players connected to the same network, without you having to figure out how to find them with elusive numbers and network jargon.

It then provides a list of available online content services, like YouTube, TED (our personal fave), Vimeo, IMDB, Flickr, Funny or Die and an ever increasing list of other places that, until now, you've probably only accessed through a computer.

The app works much like a web browser rather than a remote control, but when it comes to loading, say, a YouTube video, it instead instructs your connected media player where to find it online and to begin playing it on your TV.

The simplicity of Twonky Beam Browser is its real strength. Using it exactly as you would use Safari. The only major difference is that the video, photo or whatever else magically appears on your TV rather than on your iPhone's screen.

You can continue browsing while beaming content to your TV, of course, so suddenly the Internet becomes a kind of vast repository of multimedia content that can instantly be viewed in the living room. Twonky Beam Browser takes the effort out of this very technical setup and operation and allows you to concentrate on the content, rather than the jargon.

We did uncover something of a glitch, whereby the on-screen keyboard doesn't go away after searching. This wouldn't be a huge problem except you lose the app's control buttons on the bottom of the screen, and a close down and restart is required after each search.

It'll probably be easily fixed with an update, but it's a shame to stumble on this last hurdle with an otherwise highly intuitive and user-friendly app that brings the Internet into your living room with such minimal effort.