Microsoft Extends the Media Center PC You Have Permission To Not Put the Computer in Your Living Room Eric Grevstad
Mon 1/12/04 -- In November 2002, Microsoft launched Windows XP Media Center Edition -- a software platform that turned the home PC into a hub for digital entertainment ranging from DVD movies and digital-music playlists to digital-photo slide shows and TV viewing and recording. The software giant also touted the Smart Display, a second, wirelessly connected LCD monitor that consumers could carry to other rooms of the house to surf the Web, check e-mail, or peruse digital pictures.
Today, the Smart Display is dead as a doornail; nobody wanted to pay $1,000-plus for a dumb, diskless touch screen when they could access the desktop via a far more functional, wirelessly networked notebook or Tablet PC. And for all the hype about the Media Center as a "living-room PC," the home computer is still usually found in the den or family room, not in the living room alongside the TV.
But Microsoft is still keen on connecting the two. At last week's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) keynote in Las Vegas, chairman Bill Gates introduced the company's latest bid to own the home: Windows Media Center Extender Technology.
PC Meets TV Meets Xbox
Media Center Extenders are part of Microsoft's new mantra of "seamless computing" -- user-friendly ways to extend digital music, photos, and videos from the PC to a variety of home and handheld devices. Specifically, they let consumers access the Media Center PC's content library -- listening to music or looking at digital photos or a recorded TV show -- on any TV in the home. Several Extenders can access the PC simultaneously, even while the latter is being used by another family member.
One Media Center Extender will connect the Media Center PC directly to a TV set; another to a set-top box which in turn is connected to the TV; and a third, consisting of a special remote control plus DVD-based software, to a Microsoft Xbox game console which in turn etc.
By the 2004 holiday season, Microsoft promises, partners such as Gateway, Dell, HP, Samsung, and Alienware will be selling TVs and set-top boxes (and Microsoft will presumably be selling Xboxes) with Media Center Extender Technology built in, eliminating the need for an in-between device -- and bringing the price premium down from the $150-to-$200 range to something under $50.
Any Room of the House, Or Outside the House
The "seamless computing" checklist also includes Windows Media Connect, a standard protocol for consumer electronics devices -- presumably other than TVs -- to access digital content stored on a Windows XP computer over a home network. Microsoft touts this as applying to "digital media receivers" built by vendors like Creative Labs, Toshiba, Mediabolic, Roku, and Arcadyan Technology Corp., and has lined up Napster, MusicNow, and Launch Music on Yahoo to endorse the technology for their respective digital music libraries and digital rights management implementations.
Napster also joins CinemaNow in backing Microsoft's new Portable Media Center spec, a Tablet PC-style platform or reference design that uses the software titan's Windows Media Audio and Video 9 compression and copy-protection scheme to store and Intel's XScale processor to play music, photos, and videos on a handheld, LCD-screened successor to today's MP3 audio players.
Creative showed prototypes of its Zen Portable Media Center at CES, and other firms including Sanyo, Samsung, ViewSonic, and Gateway are signed up to offer the gadgets in the second half of 2004. Microsoft says a Portable Media Center with 40GB of storage will be able to hold up to 175 hours of video, 10,000 songs, or as many as 100,000 pictures.
It's Beginning To Look a Lot Like (Next) Christmas
It seems clear the 2004 holiday season will be crowded with both Media Center PCs and Media Center-networkable or -downloadable devices ranging from set-top boxes to rack- or stackable receivers and handheld players. It's also clear that Microsoft wants its audio and video formats to replace today's digital standards, whether the MP3 of Apple's iPod or the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 of current and proposed DVDs (yet another CES announcement touted the delivery of the recent surfing documentary Step Into Liquid and 15 other higher-than-DVD-definition, surround-sound movies on Windows Media 9 discs for Media Center PCs).
What's not clear, however, is whether even mighty Microsoft can prevail in setting a standard: With HP and Apple taking advantage of CES to announce the former's licensing of the latter's iPod, and everyone from consumer groups to Congress clashing over the "fair use" implications of the RIAA's and MPAA's digital-rights denial of consumers' unfettered right to transfer the music and movies they buy onto the devices they own, the brave new world of digital entertainment continues to look like a dangerous place.
