Manufacturers have spent the better part of a decade trying to figure out how to get PCs into people’s living rooms. In the late ‘90s, there was a spate of tier-two OEMs who tried to plant a regular PC in a thin chassis, add an integrated S-Video port, and pass it off as an “entertainment appliance.” Those did about as well as Internet appliances. Perhaps you’ve noticed that the words “appliance” and “computing” never appear together anymore.

The idea of an entertainment appliance was decent, just horribly premature. Nobody had broadband. The form factors were ugly. The video and CPU horsepower necessary to carry off TV encoding wasn’t there yet, even if you resorted to an external device such as NVIDIA’s original Personal Cinema. The Personal Cinema worked well for its time, but in the end its use was still a cumbersome, unrewarding experience.

Then came TiVo, and suddenly the path became clear. Mind you, while I enjoy TiVo’s functionality, I dislike the idea of adding yet another monthly subscription onto people’s budgets. I have upgraded TiVo machines and seen first-hand that these are little more than a motherboard, hard drive, and IR receiver. TiVo is a relatively dumb set-top box backed by a grossly overpriced subscription to TiVo’s electronic programming guide (EPG) data ($13/month or $299 for life). The critical thing that TiVo accomplished was bringing the concept of a PVR/DVR (personal/digital video recorder) to the mainstream.

TiVo was not the first PVR, though. ATI’s ALL-IN-WONDER cards already delivered similar recording functionality, as did tuner/software combos from companies such as Hauppauge. But TiVo drew the clear distinction between a two-foot and ten-foot experience, referring to how far the user is from the display screen. Everything of note on the PC do date used a two-foot, mouse- and keyboard-based UI. TiVo had the remote control. A fledgling company called SnapStream released its first two versions of a PVR application called Personal Video Station in 2000. Microsoft, hoping to catch a new wave, released its first version of Windows Media Center Edition in 2002. Most of these early efforts were buggy. All of them drew more press attention than they did users. Even when Microsoft came out with its revamped Windows Media Center Edition 2004 last year, the tier-one OEM partners were stunned at the lackluster public reception their designs received.

What Happened?

I have a theory. I wound up with an HP m370n MCE 2004 box in my office for testing, and, apart from a few EPG hiccups that got worked out with tech support, the PC was fantastic. The MCE box finally landed in my bedroom, where it worked stunningly—until my wife demanded its eviction. The problem was that MCE 2004’s text output to a conventional CRT television looked terrible, so I had to use the flat panel that shipped with the system. This necessitated installing a folding table, and suddenly an entire corner of the bedroom had become a form factor disaster, and out went my precious PVR. My wife, taken with the concept of remote scheduling and disk-based recording, in turn pleaded for a TiVo.

My experience demonstrated several lessons confirmed by the industry over the past year:

1. A quality experience matters. If a media center solution is going to be a hybrid between a TiVo and a PC, then it must perform both functions with equally high-quality end-user experiences. This applies to video as well as audio quality. Last year, this condition was not met.

2. The thing that Microsoft did right and competing platforms did not (originally) was create a unified interface through which all home media could be browsed via remote control—not just TV recordings but also digital video files, photos, CD music, DVD movies, and even radio. Microsoft had its unified interface more or less spot on in 2003, but the chief barrier remaining on this front was (and remains) the general lack of consumer expertise in creating, editing, and managing digital media files.

3. Form factor is paramount. A tower generally cannot exist to the satisfaction of all parties in a bedroom, family room, or similar environment. A media center must blend into its surroundings, and this generally means being in a form factor similar to existing consumer electronics devices, such as amplifiers and DVD players...and TiVos. In 2003, there were virtually no solutions to address this, and many problems still remain heading into 2005.

I should point out on this last point that there are two schools of thought about form factor and media centers, and we are divided on this thinking even within the ranks of RAM editors. I lean toward media centers sitting on shelves, coexisting with other CE devices. Others subscribe to planting the media center in a closet or basement, wherein a bulky, fully loaded tower sits in a secluded place and serves up media to client devices throughout the house. We’ll return to this argument next month when we focus on media center hardware, although I will add that in his recent “Digital Entertainment Anywhere” keynote, Bill Gates indicated that the vision of pervasively available personal media would require “PCs that are quiet, PCs that fit into the living room in the right way.” Nuff said.

For now, the hot topic of the day is Microsoft’s release of Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, which proves once again that the Rule of Three is alive and well in Redmond. (You might recall Windows, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft’s numerous other projects in which it took three major releases in order to “get it right.”) Interestingly, Microsoft had MCE as an operating system 90% nailed in the 2004 version. What convinces me that MCE 2005 is a killer app is everything tied to it, from Windows Media Player 10 to MCE Extenders. MCE 2005 is, quite honestly, the most exciting thing I’ve seen happen to PCs since the advent of 802.11 and one that will, either directly or indirectly, reshape how computers are used in the home.

Now, here’s the amazing thing to me: Most people still have no idea what a media center is. That applies not only to end-users but also system builders and employees within Microsoft. Mainstream end-user ignorance is understandable because media center PCs have been the domain of relatively wealthy niche enthusiasts. System builders have had no need to learn about MCE because it was only available on a handful of tier-one OEM designs and not offered to the channel at all. And Microsoft employees? Probably a combination of both factors. After all, if you weren’t in the MCE project, there was no push from the mainstream to learn about it.

Again, MCE 2005 changes everything. On October 12th, the revamped OS, based on Windows XP SP2, went on sale through channel distributors to system builders and VARs. I was fortunate enough to attend Microsoft’s two-day Digital Media Reviewer’s workshop before the launch, and I guarantee that when you finally put your hands on all the pieces of this new technology and put it to work for your own enjoyment, your head will spin with ideas on how to market it to your consumer client base. But to get you from here to there, we’re going to take a two-issue look at today’s media center scene and make sure you have a solid grasp of the value in this platform and how you can compete effectively against retail and the tier-ones.

At the Beginning

One of the hardest things for an average system builder to swallow with MCE 2005 will be the limited hardware compatibility list. Any urge to pursue bargain basement configurations will be largely thwarted—and for good reason. Pulling off a genuinely high-quality, multi-function MCE experience is no lightweight task.

Minimum recommened specs for MCE 2005:
Along with Microsoft’s Rule of Three goes Microsoft’s Rule of Spec Doubling, which states that you can safely take the company’s list of minimum hardware requirements and double it to arrive at a satisfactory configuration, and even that may not always be sufficient. For example, one of my test configurations was a 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 Northwood running 1GB of Kingston DDR400 and an ATI RADEON 9800 PRO. With Outlook, Word, and four IE windows open, I could not run Windows Media Player 10 at full-screen with the Energy Bliss visualization active. Expanding just the visualization to full-screen resulted in animation playback of perhaps two frames per second—not the sort of thing you want for a showroom demo.

The only DVD decoder on Microsoft’s recommended list as of pre-launch was NVIDIA’s NVDVD (ForceWare 4.00.29 or higher), although I’m sure that InterVideo’s WinDVD and CyberLink’s PowerDVD will achieve the coveted “Designed for Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition” logo approval, probably by the time you read this.

Note that a TV tuner is not a requirement, although building an MCE 2005 box without one seems a bit ridiculous. Microsoft attributes this to end-user feedback about costs for the remote and tuner. I’d be more inclined to suspect pressure from the channel to enable certain price points. Again, we’ll come back to hardware issues next month, but suffice it to say for now that Hauppauge and NVIDIA’s NVTV dominate the initial list of approved tuners.

Microsoft sent me one of several available MCE 2005 bundles to conduct my reviews. This one contained the MCE 2005 dual-CD software set, an NVTV NVIDIA tuner card, NVIDIA 6800 GT PCI Express graphics card, Microsoft MCE remote control, eHome IR receiver, and a wired IR emitter bulb to stick on the receiver of my Comcast HD set-top box. There are several variations on this kit sold through distribution, including those based on ATI parts.

Microsoft will tell you—at least they told me—that the hardware setup in MCE 2005 is easier than in prior OS versions, to which I say “humbug!” The OPK (OEM Preconfiguration Kit) tool may make preinstalling an image to a new build’s hard drive easier, but because of the additional emphasis on form factor constraints and media playback quality considerations, I found that there is potentially more trouble to be had with an MCE 2005 build. In terms of our software discussion here, yes, if you abide by the MCE logo program when selecting your components, half of your problems will be solved. But when we get around to discussing hardware, you’ll see that a little trial-and-error and a lot of configuration planning are needed to create an optimal MCE 2005 configuration.

Also, watch your drivers. When I finally did have a satisfactory system build running on my bench, the little beast kept crashing on me. As it turns out, I had used the NVIDIA ForceWare drivers for XP I’d grabbed a couple of days previously. When I deleted these and downloaded the NVIDIA GeForce drivers expressly for XP Media Center Edition, my stability problems declined markedly—as in I went from measuring crashes in weeks rather than hours.

Once you’re MCE 2005 PC is assembled, you’ll find that the OS installation from CD is almost identical to that in Windows XP, only now there are two CDs you’ll need to swap (twice). One huge and long overdue kudo goes to Microsoft for building native SATA support into MCE 2005 so that we can finally dispense with floppy drives once and for all. There is no more F6 to hit unless you really do have a SCSI or RAID driver to install.

When you finally arrive at the desktop, you’ll find a new background waiting for you with new themes, screen savers, and so on. The look is very similar to XP, but bolder, as if everything is illuminated more brightly, and surfaces are more dramatically embossed. The only other difference to be found on the MCE 2005 desktop vs. XP SP2 is a Start Menu item called Windows Digital Media Enhancements. This now includes a WMA and MP3 transcoder utility, CD label maker, and the Windows Dancers and Party Mode (a screen locking tool for WMP that still lets visitors create a jukebox playlist) brought over from Plus!

Beyond the Green Button

The Microsoft-branded, de facto MCE 2005 remote control is a very well-designed unit with intuitive button placement. You’ve got player controls on top—including a power button that sends the MCE PC into suspend mode in under two seconds and back up to the login screen in under six—alphanumeric buttons on the bottom, and the key navigation and channel/volume buttons under your thumb in the middle. Going with an RF remote instead of IR would seem to make sense for systems that are likely to get hidden as much as possible, but I suppose they had to leave something (besides non-OTA HDTV support) for MCE 2006.

All right, let’s dig in. Smack in the middle of the remote sits a green button showing the flapping Windows flag. Pressing it starts up the MCE UI and plants you in the center of a list of MCE areas: Play DVD, Online Spotlight, My Videos, My Pictures, My TV, My Music, Radio, More Programs, and Settings. By default, the UI always starts by highlighting My TV, so we’ll start there.

My TV

The MCE interface makes a habit of running sub-categories down the left of the screen and options or data down the right, but the welcome screen is one exception. Here, all of the main areas run down the center of the screen in text suitably large and clear for viewing across a room. (Keep in mind that you can adapt MCE’s UI for from a conventional 4:3 aspect ration to 16:9 widescreen in the Settings.)

Occasionally, you’ll see two or three large icons to the right of a highlighted area listing. Usually, these are the equivalent of “recently viewed” shortcuts, but in the case of My TV the out-of-the-box view shows two icon shortcuts, one for Recorded TV and the other for Live TV. These may save you a click or two, but for now let’s just say you press the My TV listing.

The Live TV and Recorded TV links show up on the left, with a section for recent recordings in the top-right and scheduled recordings in the bottom-right. If there is already some kind of media running, you’ll see a thumbnail of it in the lower-left corner, whether that’s a movie playing or a CD album cover.

Hitting Live TV simply inflates the present channel you’re on to up to fill the screen. Note, however, that hitting the “i” (MORE) button on the remote will show channel, title, and time information in a bar across the bottom as well as a shortcut list for Program Info, Messenger, and Settings. One commendable feature in MCE is that it is always buffering the live TV stream to the hard drive. This way, if the user hits the Record or Pause buttons, the bits start saving into a file instantly, not five or ten seconds later after the recording module initializes and the drive spins up. Many PVR applications fail to take this step.

The Recorded TV area, as you would expect, displays a list of recorded shows as well as a tally at the bottom of the total number and hours of recordings. You can sort the list by date or title. The Scheduled link shows the items you’ve selected to record in the future. However, there is also a link in the Scheduled area called History. This is much like your Web browser’s history area and can come in handy at times. For example, just after I set up my MCE machine and still didn’t know that HDTV recording without a second HD tuner card was not possible, I spent two days trying to record one of the presidential debates off the PBS-HD station. Attempt after attempt, I ended up with nothing in my Recordings list. Had I consulted the History area, I would have seen each attempt result in “not recorded” and “bad tuner” messages. From there, I could have put two and two together. Of course, the History area can also be handy for seeing what other family members are watching in your absence. As this spy game works both ways, you may want to get acquainted with another link on the History page: Clear History.

One of the major differences between MCE 2004 and 2005 is the integration of dual tuner functionality. This was the last critical ingredient to really deliver an all-out satisfactory TV-on-PC experience, because with two tuners you can watch one show while recording another. Alternatively, you can record two shows on different channels simultaneously. MCE 2005’s TV setup wizard makes this a fairly painless process, and the EPG automatically adapts for allowing two recordings that would otherwise conflict. The thing to be careful of here is a difference in tuner quality. You don’t want the customer wondering why some shows look great and the others are fuzzy.

My Music

This is one of my favorite MCE areas but also one that highlights the value that system builders can bring to media centers. The My Music area is dominated by nine big album cover icons—the first nine of however many items are in your sort list—and sort links down the left for Albums (the default), Artists, Playlists, Songs, Genres, and Search. If you’ve spent any time with jukebox applications, this should be old hat.

There are a few points here worth noting. The Search link will bring up a screen with search bar into which you can type your string with a keyboard, use a mouse to tap on the alphanumeric on-screen touch pad, or use the same touch pad on your remote control. This is just as alternately convenient and cumbersome as doing text input on your cell phone. So let’s say you hit the number 2 on your remote, which also cycles through the letters A, B, and C. As soon as you hit the button, “a” appears on-screen and MCE goes to work trying to find songs and albums that use that letter.

Now, when I first started using MCE 2005, I knew that I had over 120GB of music and audiobooks (just over 27,000 files all told) stashed on a server drive dedicated to audio media. The first time I went to My Music, the system reported that it found no music files on the system, which was a bit odd since MCE 2005 comes with two sample classical tracks in the My Music folder. I was then prompted to add files either from another folder on the MCE box or elsewhere on the network. Not wanting to choke the MCE box with all of my audio data, I simply pointed MCE to this network drive. In retrospect, this was a mistake for two reasons.

First, probably for simplicity’s sake, the MCE interface only lets you select volumes rather than folders, even though the prompt says to select a folder. Because of this, MCE’s idea of My Music included both the “Music” and “Audiobooks” folders on that drive and resulted in the My Music area of MCE 2005 being flooded with tiny audiobook files no one would ever want to listen to in a living room environment. There are ways to bypass this clutter, such as sorting by genre or using an Auto Playlist, but these depend on someone having applied the correct metadata to all the tracks. And hey, if you’ve got 120GB of accurately tagged files, you’re a better geek than me.

Second, returning to our search text entry issue, hitting the number 2 on the remote put an “a” in the search field and MCE went to work searching for all entries with that letter, which was just about all of them. Left to itself, MCE didn’t complete this search for over three minutes. Because the system resources are tied up on this operation, using the alphanumeric input process is extremely slow and error-prone. Mind you, the entire LAN involved here is running on Gigabit Ethernet.

Here’s where your expertise comes in to save the customer from a frustrating MCE experience. See, you know that MCE actually gets all of its folder paths from the Monitor Folders list in WMP10 (Tools, Options, Library tab, Monitor Folders...). So even before your customer goes into MCE for the first time, you’ll want to have a conversation about media storage strategies. While the default XP configuration is fine for small amounts of media, this structure quickly becomes top-heavy. Does it make more sense to have a media drive in the MCE box or on the network? And is it advisable to do a mirroring RAID to protect this valuable media collection from disaster? You begin to see the opportunities MCE 2005 opens up for on-site upgrades and UI configuration that the big OEMs simply aren’t equipped to offer.
This entire searching and folder discussion applies equally to video files, as well. Again, getting these folder paths right before the customer starts playing with the system is critical because once those unwanted files get added to the library in WMP10, getting rid of them is a long, time-intensive task for the user.

Before we leave My Music, there are two other high points worth showing to customers. First is the Add to Queue function. With many remote-based audio systems, there is no concept of a playing queue. You simply have to interrupt whatever is currently playing with the next song you want to hear. The queue is a to-be-played list you can compile and rearrange while browsing through your collection. To access the queue, you need to be in the Now Playing area by clicking on the album art in the lower-left corner of the music area screen. From here, just click on the Edit Queue link. You can also save a queue as a playlist in the Playlists area.

While you’re here, you might want to point out to customers the Buy Music link, which I enjoy more for its handy access to album reviews than buying CDs. More important is the Create CD/DVD link, which does the same thing as hitting Start Burn in WMP10. The difference, of course, is that now you can compile and create an entire disc without ever getting off the couch.

Radio

Not much to report here. This is MCE’s FM tuner interface. Assuming that you used a TV tuner card with FM tuning capabilities (or a separate FM tuner card), MCE lets you scan, tune, and manually enter station frequencies. You can save up to nine stations as presets. Aside from the fact that you can access any preset from the FM Radio area with a single button push, it’s also cool that your last three played stations show up as selectable icons next to Radio on the MCE home screen.

The one really interesting thing about the Radio section is that this section has hooks over to the online radio area (which might be more appropriately placed here). If you go into the MSN Radio area through the Online Showcase, when you come back to Radio, you’ll find a new icon for MSN Radio. When you hit the “Add to My Radio” link in MCE’s Live365 interface, it creates a shortcut icon in Radio. Pretty slick, but not terribly intuitive. This is another instance where you can impress customers with a handy tip they’re not likely to get elsewhere.

More Programs

Out of the box, there are only three entries in this area: Create CD/DVD, Messenger, and Sync to Device. As mentioned before, Create CD/DVD is a 10-foot UI version of the burn list compiled from WMP10. This is impressive stuff because it’s all remote-based, but not terribly complex. Messenger is the 10-foot edition of Windows Messenger.

For the communication addict, being able to see an IM pop up in the little of your movie is pretty sweet. After all, the networks now pop up animated banners for upcoming game shows in the middle of a dramatic climax, so why not IM, too? (For that matter, if you install a Caller ID-compatible modem, users can also be alerted when someone calls.) To initiate an IM, simply hit the “i” button from anywhere in MCE and select Messenger.

Sync to Device manually initiates a sync session to a mobile device, such as a compatible MP3 player or Personal Media Center (PMC), which we’ll examine next month.

My one point of concern here is that, after sampling the Napster and MSN Music areas, icons for both of those services appeared in More Programs. Personally, I would never look for music services in this area, and I’m a little nervous that if this is a common behavior for MCE 2005, More Programs might grow to have an inordinate number of unwanted icons cluttering the interface. So be sure to tell your customers that they can eliminate this junk by highlighting the icon-to-be-trashed, hitting “i”, and selecting Remove. Occasionally, the right-click mouse paradigm carries over to the 10-foot UI.

Settings

We could spend all day going through these options, so let’s keep it down to the essentials.

Under TV, Recorder, you want to pay attention to the Recorder Storage and Recorder Defaults sections. In Recorder Storage, the first option you can set is “Record on drive,” which refers to your target volume for recording. The default is C:, and in most systems with more than one hard drive, this is probably not the optimal location. The next option is “Maximum TV limit,” which means how much of the hard
drive can be consumed with TV recordings. In my test box with a 200GB hard drive, the defaults showed my target drive being C: (189GB) with a 189GB maximum TV limit. Needless to say, if all of the primary drive were written with recordings, the system’s performance would be crushed.

There is a third option here to change recording quality, but I would recommend leaving this at the default value of “Best”. At Best, 50GB of recording space yields 18 hours and 41 minutes of capacity. The lowest setting, “Fair”, shows 41 hours and 22 minutes. Unless your buyer is tightly constrained by a small drive and a lot of content that needs to be saved, I’d urge for the higher quality experience. If you could see the difference between video quality in MCE 2004 and 2005 side-by-side, with all of the new filtering and enhancement technologies Microsoft added (not the least of which is stepping up from 6 Mbps to 9 Mbps for a live TV compression bitrate), you’d see how much of a shame it would be to deliver less than optimal quality.

In Recording Defaults, the first option lets you decide how long recordings should be kept: until drive space is needed, one week, until the recording is watched, or until it is deleted. Media pigs like me always select the first option, which is the default. Note that recordings can be individually tagged for saving until they are deleted, a setting that will override the global setting here in Recording Defaults. Further down on this page, you can select the padding, meaning how much before and after a scheduled recording the PVR actually starts to record video.

Everything else here is relatively foofy stuff you can leave for the end-user to discover someday.

Play DVD

No surprises here. There are no special features, time stretching, or anything else. Play DVD simply launches DVD playback at full-screen. Note that the remote control features a DVD Menu button.

Online Showcase

Again, we could get mired forever here if we profiled each service, but since the MCE program isn’t set up to share service subscription revenue with system builders, we’ll skip it entirely except to say one thing: From an end-user perspective, these music, movie, sports, and news offerings are the coolest thing to hit the living room since wall-to-wall carpeting.

I know I said earlier that piling monthly subscriptions on end-users was undesirable, but I defy anyone who loves music (and hasn’t downloaded everything they could ever want to hear from the P2P networks) to live with the new Napster, MSN Music, or MusicMatch for a week and not think it’s worth $10 a month. (Stray note on MusicMatch: Even in August, MusicMatch was slated to appear among the MCE 2005 online services. On September 14th, Yahoo! announced its acquisition of MusicMatch. Strangely, MusicMatch was not on the roster of MCE services when MCE 2005 launched in October. Come to think of it, Wal-Mart’s music store didn’t survive the launch, either. However, both services show up in the Online Stores list of WMP10.) Similarly, if you can’t find the movie you want to watch on your cable or satellite service’s on-demand listings, why not download it for the same price? At the very least, you can use the MCE remote to pull up free movie trailers at Movielink.

For reseller purposes, it might be worth spending a few bucks a months on one or two of these services in order to demonstrate the value of the MCE platform to customers. Even after years of CD buying and ripping to my hard drive, I only have a few thousand songs. For $9.99 a month, the cost of three lattes or a couple stops at McDonalds, you get access to over one million songs, and the fidelity in most subscription services sounds almost indistinguishable from CD. (This is another reason for the music industry to get off its duff with DVD-Audio, but that’s another story.)

My Videos & My Pictures

There is really nothing to discuss in My Videos as it’s little more than a file browser for launching video files.

My Pictures is more or less the same at first glance, only there is also a Slide Show function. This is actually a great enhancement in MCE, because rather than flipping through images like a PowerPoint presentation, Slide Show borrows the intelligent pan-and-zoom functionality from Plus! to create slide shows that stay in motion and are much more engaging.

Now, if you highlight an individual picture and hit the Info (“i”) button, then go into the Picture Details, you can rotate images here rather than doing them with a mouse in My Computer. Additionally, if you hit Touch Up, you’ll find options to crop, adjust contrast, and compensate for red eye. Photoshoppers will find this too rudimentary for words, but, again, you can’t use a remote control in Photoshop.

SnapStream: Going Beyond MCE

Windows Media Center Edition is not the only media center play on the market. As mentioned early on, SnapStream Media has been in the PC PVR game for nearly five years, and the company’s newly released Beyond TV 3.5 shows a stellar mix of powerful sophistication and novice-conscious simplicity. Beyond TV 3.5 lacks the tight OS integration found in MCE, but its feature set more than compensates. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that enthusiasts willing to invest a bit more effort and knowledge into their PVR pursuits will find BTV 3.5’s functionality superior to MCE 2005. For system builders, SnapStream also offers a revenue opportunity wholly unaddressed by Microsoft.

Compared to MCE’s My TV area, Beyond TV 3.5’s main interface is not as clean. The home screen offers six areas: Recorded Shows, Live TV, SnapStream Net Program Guide, Setup Recordings, Settings, and Exit the Beyond TV ViewScape. SnapStream crams these disparate functions into one screen because for its entire existence, the application has been devoted solely to PVR work whereas TV is only one of several functions within MCE.

We don’t have the space to cover BTV as exhaustively as MCE, so let’s just hit some of the program’s hottest points.

1. Beyond TV’s EPG is just as easy to browse and use for initiating recordings as MCE. At first glance, you might even confuse the two. Like MCE, BTV lets you search for shows and movies based on keywords spanning criteria such as titles, actors, and directors, although MCE’s search results tend to be better. However, SnapStream lets you log into your account over the Web and view an online version of the EPG from which you can schedule recordings. There is also a mobile version of this .NET service, including a WAP-friendly interface for cell phones.

2. Media Center Edition 2005 allows for two TV tuners. Beyond TV 3.5 has no limit. The first two tuner licenses are free. Each additional license runs $20. SnapStream CEO Rakesh Agrawal once told me that Steve Allen had 30 copies of SnapStream’s software running for his own use so that the Microsoft co-founder need never miss a show.

3. While MCE 2005 uses its own file format for TV recordings, BTV 3.5 defaults to using the more standard MPEG-2. Then an extremely cool feature called ShowSqueeze allows you replace or make a copy of a recording in either MPEG-2, WMV9, or DivX to the resolution and quality settings you specify. So say you recorded an episode of Trading Spaces and wanted to generate a copy in DivX format suited to your wife’s DivX-compatible portable media player. Both copies would be available, each in its own specified folder, so your portable’s synchronization software need only grab the version meant for mobile viewing. In fact, version 3.5 also has a setting optimized for ShowSqueezing to Portable Media Center devices, which we’ll visit next month. Microsoft does not offer a similar transcoding function within MCE 2005 save for the WMV-only transcoding done for synchronizing TV and videos to PMC devices through WMP10, a process in which the user has no manual control over quality or size settings.

4. Beyond TV can automatically analyze your recordings and locate commercial blocks. Whereas some PVR systems offer a 30-second skip function (MCE 2005 has this), with one click of the remote BTV will instantly fast forward to the end of a commercial block. I tested this feature extensively in version 3.0. Some reviewers said it was mostly accurate, but I found it to be faultless during my evaluation.

5. Support for Beyond TV Link ($40) is SnapStream’s answer to Microsoft’s MCE Extender (also being covered next month). Rather than use separate, proprietary boxes to echo the BTV interface to multiple points in the home. This is another excellent opportunity for system builders since they won’t have to compete against retail on a sealed product, customers can keep their investments in existing PCs, and Beyond Link opens plenty of chances to go upgrade and configure those PCs as well as the home network.

6. Users can log into their BTV systems remotely and view both recordings as well as live TV streamed over the Internet. Sure, the video quality is likely to be poor, but a suitably ShowSqueezed version might do well enough, and, in any case, being able to turn one’s PC into a streaming video server for practically free is a great selling point to advanced buyers.

SnapStream does not have the stringent hardware guidelines, much less a logo program, that Microsoft does. SnapStream has also not invested the vast sums of money into video signal refinement that its larger competitor has done. Still, Tim Corcoran, SnapStream’s vice president of sales, feels that most of the quality issue comes down to the tuner, not the software.

“If the user has a card with hardware encoding, whether it’s older or newer, I would say no, you’re not going to have a lesser quality experience [than with MCE 2005]. If it’s software-encoded, definitely.”

This will doubtless come as welcome news to system builders casting about for a way to seize on the media center craze while still offering a budget-oriented solution.
Of course, you’ve probably noticed that Beyond TV only handles TV functions while MCE does much more. That’s why SnapStream will be releasing a companion application called Beyond Media on November. Still in beta as of this writing, Beyond Media will work hand-in-glove with BTV and will fill in that missing photo, video, DVD, and music functionality. The SnapStrean Spotlight area will closely resemble MCE’s Online Spotlight, and SnapStream will also perform the same pan-and-zoom slideshows as MCE. Beyond Media’s one apparent standout feature is its easy access to weather information and movie times.

Beyond Media is expected to retail for $50. Add that to the $70 already in play for BTV 3.5, and you’ve got a $120 price jump on your hands for a SnapStream media center—not so great for a budget-minded approach to MCE. That’s where SnapStream’s newfound savvy for the reseller channel comes in.

“We understand that selling system builders a $70 product is not going to work from a cost perspective,” said Corcoran, “and I have to explain to every one I talk with that we license the program guide data and pay to integrate it into our product. But I don’t expect them to pay for that out of the chute, so I’m going to give them a very aggressive OEM price, sub-$10 for Beyond TV and Beyond Media together, that they can use. They’ll turn around and sell the system, but the program guide data will time out after 60 days. At that point, we’ll message it appropriately that the program guide is about to time out and you’ve got three options: One is you can go to a Web-based EPG and pay nothing. Two, you can pay $30 for a year. Or three, you can pay $60 for a lifetime of EPG service. Then we share that upgrade revenue. I tell you, if you use Beyond TV for 60 days and it times out on the 61st day, you’re definitely going to want it back. I’ll share up to 20% of that revenue with the reseller, and those checks go out monthly.”

SnapStream will even go so far as to help committed resellers apply their own “skins” to Beyond TV so that the program is branded with the system builder’s logo, color scheme, and such. The company is now in the process of setting up its reseller site, so be sure to check back periodically for access to channel support, marketing materials, and other program offerings.

“We take pride in making sure that everything we do is wife-friendly, user-friendly, easy to use,” said Corcoran. “My kids are experts at it, and the oldest is 13. Honestly, Microsoft is pretty good at this, too, although others in this space are not. And we’re not going to beat Microsoft in the market. But there is a niche out there, and we’re going to exploit it. We’re going to look at other platforms, we’re not going to stop innovating, and we’re going to be that alternative. The goal is to give the consumer and the reseller community a viable option.”

Sharing the Wealth, Part II

C.A.C. Media (Convergence, Access, and Content; see www.cacmedia.tv) has a different twist on media centers en route for system builders. Founded in 2001, C.A.C.’s primary business is the development of a Linux-based convergence platform that can be ported into everything from an x86-based PC to an embedded processor in a plasma monitor. One of the first examples to reach market is a rather voluminous PC/set-top box called the Lafayette MediaReady 4000, based on VIA’s mini-ITX motherboard platform.

“We’ve developed an entire operating system based on Linux that provides an alternative to Microsoft XP MCE,” said C.A.C. founder and CEO Ken Nelson. “That’s all the applications, including media playback. For resellers, we also provide private label content delivery network on their behalf on those devices. The Lafayette set-top, for instance, is sold as a media center, but when a user turns it on, they’ll be able to purchase upgrades, buy movies, music, and all kinds of content that’s delivered to the unit over the IP channel, and that can be connected either by wire or wireless. We do the private labeling on the OEM’s behalf, then we bring them into the royalty stream on all of the games—any of the content that is sold over their device for the lifetime of the unit. The device is OEM-branded, and we provide a formula so everyone in the value chain of getting that product to market gets a piece of that residual revenue—not just a one-time sale, but for a lifetime.”

The MediaReady 4000 is a highly customized box tailored for a set-top or CE component situation, but it really is just a PC able to deliver CD, DVD, and MPEG-1/2/4 playback as well as conventional, low-level applications such as Web browsing, email, karaoke, and gaming. For users who don’t need 3D gaming functionality, a small mini-ITX box loaded with C.A.C.’s operating system may be just the ticket—not to mention low-power and fanless.

Also of interest here is C.A.C.’s Content Delivery Network. Essentially, anyone with 30 hours or more of video that meets certain guidelines can use the CDN to start their own TV channel. Channels currently in production for 2005 span topics ranging from yoga to budget travel to “Frat Party USA.” Whether or not you find the programming to be of must-see quality (and it’s not like conventional cable and satellite fares much better), the point is that this is an innovative content vehicle in which resellers can take a slice of the revenue stream for selling the platform while still offering a bona fide media center solution.

The CDN is expected to launch in the first quarter of 2001, right about the time that C.A.C. comes out with its first approved components for system builders. I mentioned to Ken Nelson my concern that some resellers would possess no knowledge of Linux and be unable to program or configure their systems. He replied that so long as a system builder stuck to the list of approved components, C.A.C. could provide a disk image that integrators could merely copy onto each machine. Beyond copying, there is no configuration needed whatsoever.

While Nelson would not give specifics, he noted that C.A.C. has been in discussions with both VIA and Intel regarding media center platform designs.

Are We There Yet?

Some would argue that these three media center solutions and the several less channel-friendly alternatives (SageTV, Meedio, MythTV, et. al.) all build upon a decade of convergence failures. Others might say that they are the latest and greatest in home entertainment evolution. Regardless of which you believe, media centers are now coming to the system builder channel. But why now?

Howard Manson, general manager of regional distributor Bass Computers, offered his answer for why Windows MCE has taken this long to break away from the tier-one OEMs.

“The 2003 and 2004 versions were released only to the tier-one channel, right? HP, Compaq, Dell, and Gateway built media center units, and customer dissatisfaction was unbelievably high. The mains reasons were in video, audio, and timing of the equipment, where you would try to record live TV and burn a DVD or set up pictures at the same time. The hardware just wasn’t there, and it is now.

“The second reason it flopped was that the tier-ones couldn’t take it to the channel effectively, because when you install a media center unit in a home, it needs to interact with cable, satellite, FM, audio, a current surround sound, a new surround sound. Is it going to go to an analog TV? Will it go to a plasma monitor? There are a lot of proprietary things in MCE 2005 that make sure the end-user has a proper experience. The local reseller channel will have the upside on that because one, they already know the market, two, they’ve probably already been in these people’s homes, and three, they can go in and fine-tune these systems. The tier-ones can’t get into people’s homes without ringing up the price substantially with contracted third parties.”

Honestly, I think we are there. As Microsoft commences its MCE media blitz and works to bring media center functionality to the mainstream, much like Intel did with mobile wireless technology in its Centrino campaign, it will create market pull for the entire category. This coming year will be the time when system builders are finally able to penetrate the living room and open up a whole new wave of consumer computing solutions and thus system sales.

Additionally, Microsoft has taken the lead in the channel by providing a wealth of resources on its OEM System Builder site. The Windows XP Media Center Edition Readiness Center offers everything from the MCE 2005 preinstallation kit to a guided tour of the MCE remote to a surprisingly good sales script for showroom salespeople. Even the MCE newsgroups at the site are stuffed with valuable info. In fact, it was one newsgroup posting on the site that tipped me off about modifying the Monitor Folders list to better manage MCE’s My Music performance.

Microsoft has finally taken a proactive stance on helping system builders to lead the media center charge, and this is sure to yield great rewards.

“We’ve stepped back and taken a holistic view of the need for digital entertainment being a pervasive experience for people,” said Microsoft’s lead product manager Mike Coleman. “We’ve worked with device manufacturers to be able to take video and home movies with you on a portable media device, music on a variety of form factors from flash-based to large hard drive, digital audio receivers that connect wirelessly to your Windows XP PC anywhere in the house. We want real simple integration, real choice in how people choose to do their entertainment. That’s why I think the wave that MCE 2005 is kicking off is going to be impressive for consumers.”

We at RAM think so, too. But software is only half of the battle. Without the right hardware to complement the software platforms—both inside the chassis and out—the media center solution falls flat. So don’t miss next month’s coverage on media center hardware and the industry’s outlook on this explosive opportunity.