On Wednesday, a digital media player with a built-in 500GB hard drive and support for HD video was introduced by Netgear.

The name of the Digital Entertainer Elite is EVA9150, which allows the user to watch videos, images and listen to music on their TV and stereo.

Furthermore, the users can also acquire access to Internet content, like YouTube, Internet radio, Flickr and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds.

The users would also be happy to know that EVA9150 also supports video with a resolution of up to 1080p when playing back, such as, Windows Media Video 9, H-264 or MPEG-4 files.

Through either a bigger hard drive or an external storage unit, the Digital Entertainer Elite's disk space can be extended and the company recommends using its ReadyNAS Pioneer Pro Edition, which is available with six bays for potential capacity of 9TB.

The player that can take advantage of the 5GHz band using 802.11n, which isn't as crowded as the 2.4GHz band, comes with support for wired and wireless networks.

Further features include “Follow Me” and “Party Mode”, via which the users are able to pause a video in one room and start again it in another and coordinate music playback for whole-home listening. However, multiple units are required to make it happen.

It has being reported that Netgear’s main motive behind the launch of this latest media player is to beat AppleTV.

As far as the pricing and availability is concerned, it has been learnt that the Digital Entertainer Elite would most probably come in February carrying a price tag of US$399.