Microsoft's new OS based on an idea that people want to hook up computer, TV

Great Debates
1

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,124325,00.asp

I don’t understand what would be so cool or interesting about being able to get media content from your computer to your TV, or from your TV to your computer.

But according to this article, the wave of the future will involve more and more people doing just this.

(The article starts out talking about how computers are expected to become more like TVs used to be, but then goes on to talk about how a computer-TV hook-up is going to come to be the shiznit.)

I dun’ get it.

Who thinks that its a neat-o idea to hook up your computer to your TV, and to regularly use that linkup for everyday media consumption?

Barring that, why would Microsoft think it plausible to bet a lot of money on the notion that this will be something people would want to do?

-Kris

2

I seem to recall that they tried this a couple of years ago. It bombed then, but it might work better now. Several of the big computer companies (eg: Dell and Gateway) are getting into the business of plasma and LCD TVs.

If they’re going to include software to let you use your computer as a DVR, it could work. Imagine syncing up your cell phone to your computer/TV and watching a show you recorded last night on the bus to work.

3

Can I just get an operating system that efficiently runs my programs without all of this extraneous crap I neither need nor desire.

4

I am not a PC / Windows user, strictly a Mac fellow, never owned a PC.

But regardless of platform, why concede TiVo to some 3rd party when your complex mutifunction OS can do TiVo things and also publish your recorded shows to some format that your favorite database program (FileMaker, Access, SQL-variants) can slurp in and link to metadata downloaded from the web?

And those stupid things called cellphones — has it never bugged you that if you have someone’s teletphone number in some database or table, you still have to push the freakin’ buttons on the phone? And that your incoming calls don’;t leave footprints, and if it goes to voicemail you only have an auditory means of referencing them, and limited storage space? Wouldn’t you rather that telephony was part of what computers do i.e., any phone number anywhere in the computer can be selected and dialed? And that your computer saves a record of all outgoing and incoming calls (date, fromnumber, tonumber, duration, callierID identity string, soundfile of the call in .mp3 format, transcript of the call via voice recognition in plain text format, etc)?

How about being able to program your TV from your computer from a wide variety of interfaces, switching channels, delaying signal to HDTV screen by enough duration to screen out ads as they come up, etc.?

Go back after the show is over and select 0:52 of the broadcast that was exceptionally funny or on-target and select it and paste to a new QuickTime or WMV file and save to a location of your choice?

We’ve been doing it for years (but piecemeal and in large part via 3rd-party apps) on the Mac platform; it only makes sense that MS would concatenate these various A/V utility functions into a converged app or interface and market it as part of what the OS does. Frankly, if Microsoft didn’t, I’d think they were slipping.

5

Try one of the many flavors of Linux.

6

Both MS and Apple are approaching this convergence in their own ways.

Picture this:

A large flat screen TV that has built into it a decent computer (for us mac people think of a wall mounted G5 with a cinema sized screen or larger (maybe it only needs a MacMini built in). Tuner built in. TiVo style capabilities but also iTunes (or Google video) with downloads of quality high enough to play on HDTV for a wide variety of content new and old. Capacity to load it into your iPod in a compressed format to view on the road. Wirelessly load to to any other screen in your house. And sure have an option to do your web surfing or word crunching on it to, but you’ll probably want to do that on another machine, outside the family room.

MS’s version includes the games as the key profit center. they want that center to be around an X-Box and for people to buy liscenced games and participate in X-Box live. They are going to let Google and Apple and others develop downloadable video.

Apple’s version will be aiming to build on iPod. Get people watching on (and buying for) iPod now and they’ll be in the habit of visiting iTunes as they transition into higher quality downloads on wall mounted HDTV over the next few years.

I’ll bet on Apple’s vision prevailing at this point.

7

On the other hand, I recall a recent study of users, and generally… they didn’t see the point in convergence. Not early adopters, normal users. The first concern was, if one thing breaks, they don’t want everything to break.

Microsoft’s vision of locking everyone in is… going to be an entertaining failure.

8

Perhaps not between the computer and the TV, but I bet there’s still a market out there for this

9

Some thoughts on all of this:
I don’t personally see a benefit unless the media center is a simple appliance with no moving parts, no need to keep an OS up to date, and none of the other problems/frailties associated with PC OS’s (including Mac).

Microsoft and Apple do not want to let someone else set the standard, even if the demand is low right now, so they will keep pushing at this stuff.

On the other hand, Sony/Toshiba/IBM created the Cell and plan on using it in TV’s, PS3, other Consumer Electronics, etc.

Given the capabilities of the Cell processor, I wouldn’t be surprised if Sony’s plan was to make the TV or the Stereo the media center. The chip is already there that is powerfull enough, throw in a simplified OS for only the TV, iPod, game, type of functions with a simple TV screen interface, and maybe a couple USB ports, etc. etc.

10

It gets worse. The media center functions require a higher end PC than the average joe type of stuff. I doubt most people will care enough to spend more money on the computer just to do these functions.

11

Sure, but as we’ve learned from the computer market is that what cost a lot today ends up costing very little in the future. In 1999 when I built my first PC a 1 Gig processor, just the processor alone, would have cost me nearly $1,000 dollars. Now I can buy an entire PC with all sorts of bells and whistles for the same amount of money.

Marc

12

Meh. Maybe. More likely, it’s not too different to the kind of dreamy futurism that gave us promises about the Atomic Kitchen Of Tomorrow back in the fifties.

It might work well for bachelors, but how is it going to work in a family situation? Dad wants to use the ComputerTelevisionPhoneGameConsole to watch the footy, Mum wants to use the ComputerTelevisionPhoneGameConsole to sell shoes on eBay; daughter wants to use the ComputerTelevisionPhoneGameConsole to phone her friends about Friday night and son wants to use the ComputerTelevisionPhoneGameConsole to frag his mates in a FPS.

There’s a reason why these devices are separate. Of course if the cost can be brought down to the same as the individual cost of any one of the component functions, then again, maybe - because everyone can have one. But that’s not terribly likely to happen.

13

I have one of these systems, or I should say that a family member has one, being and employee of Microsoft. While I don’t think it’s the be-all and end-all of the concept, I do think the basic idea is not a bad one.

Our setup involves one main PC, a fairly powerful one, and an extender box which allows all the media center functions to operate on a second TV elsewhere in the house (like with any such system that requires a tuner, it’s limited to one channel per household unless we buy a second tuner for the second Tv).

The main PC is hooked up to our widescreen Tv, which you can, like with most computers, use as your main monitor (which aint great for lots of text, but fine for TV/videogame content. You can play DVDs off the computer onto the Tv obviously. I particularly enjoy playing PC games on the widescreen (Day of Defeat Source is gorgeous), but since you can do this with any computer, that’s beside the point.

Media center is just like an application on the computer, displayed on your TV, and it can run fullscreen or in a window on the desktop (so you can watch TV and do other stuff). Media center, which works off a remote control as well as mouse input, is basically a front end to all sorts of media content. You can listen to and record radio. You can use the computer HD as DVR and watch your recorded shows and movies, and it has a full guide system and so forth: all the usual DVR bells and whistles. You can look through picture albums. You can listen to your music albums and buy music. All of this is basically a TV-like front end to stuff you can do on a computer. And the extender basically allows you to do all this from the other TV as well (so someone can look through a picture album that’s on the computer while I watch TV on the same computer, or they watch a recorded show while I watch Live Tv and surf the web at the same time, etc.).

The combination of TV and computer is pretty natural. As a system, I don’t have any problems with it. If you don’t know much about PCs, it might be hard to set up and grasp the underlying ideas, but if it is set up then they can basically treat it exactly like a smart TV and just use the remote to surf through tv, pictures, radio, shopping, etc. (i.e., you never need to quit to the desktop and realize that it’s all being run on a computer) The situation that Mangetrout can happen: all you need is a decently powerful TV and an extender per monitor/PC. We have both cable and broadband (over which the digital telephone line runs as well as the net connection): those are the two “content” ins for the system.

I can also see the obvious and easy integration of live TV with web content actually becoming a reality here, though that has as much to do with the cable signal as it does with the media center.

All and all, it’s not a crazy idea. I don’t think it’s quite to the point where it’s a compelling need or combination, but it certainly is a step-up in terms of what you can do (the DVR and a computer are very obvious thing to combine).

Interestingly, the format that it records TV in seems to be totally unprotected, at least in our version. You can record TV and then send the file to anyone: it’s just uncompressed AVI (you can set the quality). Since the underlying architecture is just “files on your computer” you can even dump illegal video content (like my Aqua Teen Hunger Force Divx videos) into the media center video folder and watch them as long as the right codecs are installed. The media center doesn’t care, because it’s basically just a souped up windows media player that pretends it’s a CableTv interface menu.

The only real problem is that now they’ve apparently invented the first TV that can freeze up and crash without warning. it doesn’t happen often, but ANY time it happens is more often than a regular TV/cable service.

14

I should also note that we have a separate PC, and I imagine that many power users would anyway. The media center pc seems interested in replacing and competing with DVRs. I suppose a family on a budget could just by a media center pc and extend it through the house.

For Microsoft, this seems to be the first step. Their eventual model is, from what I’ve heard, to have a central very very powerful mutli-taskable PC running everything in a household, with a much simpler extender architecture by which you could have dummy terminals or Tvs or even just speakers (for music) all over the house.

This seems to be a step down from what I was hearing a few years ago, which was to eventually push things towards homes having no local computer at all: all processing power would be piped into the house, all terminals would be dummy ones. People would be subscribing to access to large central servers that would run their programs and manage their files instead of actually running or storing them locally.

I don’t think anything is wrong with either of those models, and in fact they’d probably be more energy and money efficient in many respects. The problem is, I just don’t see them as an easy direction to take the market in a world where all the early adopters are tech and gaming geeks that want to push the limits of power on a single local machine, and certainly not in a world where people are scared about their privacy and or want to retain physical control of their computers. I think everyday users care a lot LESS about these issues and would be just fine with a cheaper distributed system. But they don’t drive the market’s lucrative and important front end. Geeks do.

15

I’ve tried TV cards in my PC to save space, there’s just nowhere for a tv in my own room. I’d comment on saving TV programmes to my HD but I just can’t seem to get a card that doesn’t regularly crash Windows…

16

I think the problem is that all these companies seem to be pushing for an all-or-nothing proposition.

I’d be thrilled if my PC, TV and DVR could talk to one another. I don’t need singular command and control. All the convergence that Microsoft, Apple, Sony and every other manufacturer have envisioned always take things a step to far imposing too many restrictions and creating too many chances for failure.

For me an ideal solution would be to have a system in which every home essentially had a server. That server is a portal through which broadband internet access and HDTV are connected. That server is minimalistic and doesn’t have the video card, audio card or UI devices. Within the home a private network is established. The TV acts as a simplistic computer capable of streaming content through the server, directly viewing HDTV, and playing games via the networked game console. Additionally the personal desktop PC uses the server as a internet gateway and all types of video are available via the included video card as it is now. Ipods, Cell Phones, and home audio all interface with the server as well.

Essentially all external content is funnelled through the server. Be it internet media, HDTV, or audio and also all local content is funnelled through there like MP3s, DVR video and photos.

Higher demand items like games will be played directly through game consoles. That way when new consoles are released you don’t need to upgrade your entire media center. High powered business computing and ghraphic design stuff takes place on the PC, not taxing the processing power of the unified server.

The benefits as I see it is that the computing environment become much more modular. If you need to upgrade your gaming environment you only need to replace the console. If you need to upgrade you personal computing environment you only need to replace the home PC (minus the high-end video and sound components).

It’s not a perfect concept I’m sure, and parts of the existing proposals are similar, but most seem to involve having one machine handling several different jobs. This seems fundamentally flawed. Specialization and interdevice communication is the wave of the future.

17

No one will end up using their large wall mounted monitor for the bulk of their email and word processing needs. These are sets that would displace the TV with an HD screen whose processing functions adds a processor chip, internet capability, a large HD, and synching capability with the iPod. These will not displace the home office or kitchen desktop machines; they’ll be value-added TV sets that will allow other sources of content to be searched bought and used. These are untapped revenue streams. Apple in particular is positioning itself to be a seller of both legal content, and the equipment in a market that is just being born.

18

No one has yet mentioned IPTV. This technology delivers digital video over an IP data stream which will compete with cable TV and satellite. It has been deployed in limited areas already (my employer has 4500 subscribers). But, SBC and Verizon will be rolling it out this year in a big way. SBC has chosen Microsoft as their middleware provider for their version of IPTV “Project Lightspeed”. When SBC and Verizon both decide to push a technology, it will have an enormous impact on the industry.

So, if you look a few years into the future, your video entertainment and information are applications that are delivered on your DSL line. Why would you not be using your PC to control, record and distribute this data application?

19

You’ll likely run into issues with simultaneous FPS and HD video together, but there’s no reason why a computer couldn’t serv up many of those things on different output devices at the same time.

I think we’re going to be moving toward a model where a house will have one heavy lifting computer and a lot of smaller “dumb” devices that connect to it. So the wife can have a little touchscreen that uses the main device to access ebay, the Dad can watch the video on the bigscreen (perhaps using a smaller, cheaper, dedicated hardware video decompressor), and the son can play FPS’s, all at the same time.

Emphasis mine.

Not for long with Microsoft products, if they continue to cater to big media.

20

Heh, I find it odd that people question why combining their technology more seemlessly is desirable.

I personally would like all of my stuff to be monitorable from one unit. Not necessarily a centralized one, but all networkable and such.

Of course I helped put together and IP TV station, so it makes perfect sense to me.

I can’t possibly imagine why anyone on Earth would want access to 8 million channels. There will be a channel for everything soon, and the difference between the internet and television will be gone, it’ll all be one system that you play your media on, whatever form that media takes. Rather than having a TiVo, X-Box, DVD Player, VCR, and Computer.

Less clutter seems like a reasonable enough answer to me.

Erek