The Joy of Kaleidescape

Do any of the following statements resonate with you?

• you have a nice TV (large, OLED, HDR)
• you have a nice sound system (5.1+)
• you care about video and audio quality
• you value convenience
• you’re willing to pay money for said quality and convenience
• you don’t want to collect Blu-rays because you don’t like clutter
• you get annoyed when:
  • you notice compression artifacts in streaming video
  • you realize that streaming services heavily compress audio
  • you go to watch something and realize it was removed from a streaming service
  • you have to search multiple streaming services for a certain movie
• you feel guilty pirating
• you don’t feel guilty pirating but get annoyed when:
  • you can’t find what you want in the best quality
  • you go to watch a movie and it’s in the wrong language
  • you go to watch a movie and it doesn’t have subtitles for the non-English parts

If so, you may be interested in Kaleidescape. And, like I was, you may be wondering: “What the hell is Kaleidescape?”

What the Hell is Kaleidescape?

Kaleidescape is a company that makes a very niche line of products that cater to cinephiles. They sell you a box which you connect to your home theater system via HDMI and the internet via Ethernet. That box has some internal storage and all of the various computing technology required to play movies and TV shows in various resolutions and HDR formats.

In contrast to something like Netflix, you don’t stream the video; you download it. They have licensing deals with most of the major studios. Those studios provide the raw master copies, and then Kaleidescape encodes them in its proprietary format at bitrates that are much higher than you get streaming and even higher than that of a Blu-ray disc (or so they claim).

Their library is extensive. So far the only movie I’ve searched for and not found is Memento. They even have Disney and HBO content, which is pretty incredible considering they each have their own streaming service. Sadly there is nothing from Netflix or Apple TV+, so you’ll have to continue watching Severance with compression and varying quality dependent on network congestion.

You can choose to rent or buy. I’ve seen purchase prices in the range of $10 to $30, and rental prices in the range of $8 to $20. Older movies, and movies that are part of a series, often come in discounted sets. If you rent a movie and then decide you want to buy it, part of the money you paid for the rental is put towards the purchase price.

Downsides

Price

Their newest release is the Kaleidescape Strato K which costs an astonishing $4995. There’s no reason it should cost that much, from an electronic component perspective. You could build a comparable HTPC running a Plex or Jellyfin server, streaming your own Blu-ray rips, at a fraction of the price. What you’re paying for is convenience, reliability, and being able to watch movies in Blu-ray quality (or higher) without doing any of the legwork.

If you really have cash to burn, they also sell absurdly priced (tens of thousands of dollars) storage servers called Terra which expand your library to tens or hundreds of terabytes, as well as server capabilities. It’s effectively their version of network-attached storage (NAS). You put the Terra server on the network, and you can access all of your movies from any room in your house that has a Kaleidescape. For me, I can’t justify the price. I have one Kaleidescape Strato K, in one room, and I’m okay with deleting a movie to make room for a new one. With 500Mbps internet, it takes about 30 minutes to download a 4k movie. If you have gigabit, it’s closer to 15 minutes.

Ownership

You don’t actually own the movie after you “buy” it. You’re given a license to watch it, as many times as you want, whenever you want. But technically a movie studio could, at any moment, remove all of their content from the Kaleidescape store. Anything you have downloaded would still be accessible, and Kaleidescape could still give existing “owners” access, but it’s always a risk.

But this isn’t any different from other services like Steam, the Nintendo eShop, or the Playstation Store. In this age of convenient click-buy-and-download, we no longer own anything. Physical media is important and gives people real ownership and the ability to lend and sell movies/games/books they’ve paid for. But I’ve come to accept that I prioritize convenience and a lack of clutter in exchange for losing true ownership.

The Experience

The experience is simple and smooth. The UI has a pleasant blue theme and doesn’t have a lot of the modern design trends that irritate me (white space, rounded corners, a lack of density). And of course movies look and sound fantastic.

All of the following screenshots are from the website.

Movie Store

You can browse the store on the website, the mobile app, or on your TV.

Overview

After selecting one, you can get an overview for the movie with a description and the video/audio formats available. You can also watch a trailer, view age recommendations and Rotten Tomato scores, and look at metadata like genre, director, writer, and cast. You can click on the various metadata to see other movies matching it; e.g., every movie directed by Martin Scorsese or every movie starring Ryan Gosling.

Formats

Each movie is available in different formats that you can select from.

Star Wars

Special Features

Many movies have special features like you’d find on a DVD or Blu-ray.

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Deleted Scenes

Many also have deleted scenes.

Se7en

Original Music

Movies with original music have the songs available.

Frozen

Music Videos

Some movies have music videos.

Avatar: Fire and Ash

Scenes

They also have something they call “Kaleidescape Scenes” which are a curated list of significant scenes in a movie that you can immediately jump to if you want to watch just that one part.

Silence of the Lambs

Collections

There are curated collections like “AFI’S Top 100 Movies” that you can select from.

Music

They have recordings of concerts and opera (with the songs separated as shown above).

Theater Control

If you’re fortunate enough to have a true home theater (projector, screen, curtains, lights, etc), the Kaleidescape can hook into your system and move the curtains, bring down the house lights, etc.

Conclusion

If you like movies, have a nice TV and sound system, care about video and audio quality, and have some disposable income, then I recommend the Kaleidescape. I’ve watched a movie every day since I got it because it’s easy and convenient and high quality.

The end.