Microsoft's Family Room Change

michael_cain writes "Siliconvalley.com is reporting that Microsoft is shutting down its Ultimate TV project. The service itself will continue to be offered. The set top box hardware developers are moving to the XBox organization. With the sales of the XBox already larger than either Ultimate TV or its predecessor, WebTV, it looks like Microsoft is adopting the game console as their method-of-choice for getting a platform to run their software into the family room." I found the decision to more or less put UltimateTV on life support and discontinue active work on it interesting - that leaves TiVo and ReplayTV as the main standing competitors.

Comments

Wow

[NiftyNews]

Proof positive that a company who is kind to its customers, values their feedback, and is based on a user-friendly GUI can actually succeed.

Chalk one up for TiVo's continued lifespan.

TiVo's doom?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about this?

Every Xbox gets UltimateTV capabilities as well as DVD and the serial number of the Xbox registers itself on Microsoft's UltimateTV network at a particular node address. Hence you can't record a Microsoft DRM recording off of TV and take the Xbox to your friends house and hope to view it.

Microsoft delivers DRM to cable providers and thus giving them all the PPV TV opportunities they want.

Not only that, but now you can rent games for your Xbox "online". Just hit a button, punch your Microsoft Passport ID and you're set. FFX is downloading to your Xbox as we speak. When the rental is over, it automatically self-destructs off of the hard drive.

Microsoft can also push firmware changes through this network to "enhance" your Xbox. Thus being able to support Microsoft DRM formats and the MPAA follows suit. All new DVDs are magically supported on the Xbox.

I would think that this is the beginning of badness...

yes but..

[josepha48]

"I found the decision to more or less put UltimateTV on life support and discontinue active work on it interesting - that leaves TiVo and ReplayTV as the main standing competitors."

Yes, but which are you more likely to buy. A game machine that double as a tivo type device or a plain old tivo type device? If they can get the XBox to record TV while playing the Xbox then they are a step up on tivo I'd think. You could let your childern play during your soaps and then watch your soaps after the kids are done playing. While that is one scenerio.

Re:Neither good nor bad...

[SirSlud]

Exactly. I think MS doesn't really put too much vested interest into any of their 'growth' arms .. basically, they just try and get into anything that they can feasibly throw together. When something sticks, they just start pointing content in their entrenched products towards that .. hard to fail when the shit has stuck and you've got more dynamic 'billboards' on this planet than anyone else.

This is only the beginning

[conan_albrecht]

of what MS will do with this. MS has already taken over the PC market, but there are many, many homes that can't afford a PC. But as someone who lived in the South side of Chicago for over a year (working with many disadvantaged homes), I can tell you *every* home with kids has a Nintendo/Sega/etc.

So now MS has a console to get into those homes. In some senses, it's good for them because they'll get a "real' computer. But of course it just extends the MS monopoly.

It's only a matter of time before we see MS Office for XBox, IE for XBox, etc. where people no longer need a regular computer. The $300 XBox does it all.

Convergence makes a lot of sense.

[Zeinfeld]

Having just bought an XBox it does seem a little odd that MSFT has two hardware platforms with almost identical purposes.

I suspect that the reorganization is more to do with internal politics and ability to deliver than a strategic shift. The WebTV project was never quite there. The cost of the device was just too much for what it delivered. Plus the WebTV platform is slow and underpowered to support UltimateTV, XBox is overkill.

WebTV could be reduced to a program that is loaded onto the console. Adding ultimate TV requires nothing more than a bigger hard drive and TV signal acquisition hardware.

What would be cool is some sort of PVR that has a firewire interface so you can plug in extra disk drives. I love my DishPlayer, but 33 hours is not enough, nor is 120. What I really need is the ability to add extra storage as I need it. I want the ability to record at least 2000 hours of video, which won't be a lot of hard drives soon.

In case you are wondering, the more seasame street I can record, the more my 11 month old will let me go online. Otherwise he comes over for computing lessons.

Obviously this heralds the Xbox 2

[cryptochrome]

The hardware developers are moving to the Xbox organization. This doesn't mean they are going to put some addon onto the Xbox. It almost certainly means this functionality will be lumped into the Xbox's successor, which is fully in line with everything we've heard about that box so far. They may have had trouble selling ultimateTV on it's own, but by putting PVR in an Xbox it will have no trouble at all becoming widespread, and offer some real competition to MS's competitors in the games and PVR arenas. And real opportunities for their investors and allies in the media.

Re:Obviously this heralds the Xbox 2

[cryptochrome]

Not everyone has bought an Xbox yet. If they retain the same game architecture/make it backwards-compatible, but add the new functionality and modify the interface some, they should have no problem attracting new users. I predict we could see it by Christmas (Game Box Special Edition?). IIRC, the hottest selling game box last christmas was the PS2, which had already been around for a year.

Re:Hurray!

[ASyndicate]

They didnt change anything with the service, they changed the machine its on. This isnt 'failure'.

Re:This is bad for Tivo..

[JabberWokky]

Let's say MS puts our UltimateTV for Xbox, or whatever it will be called. It will still require some sort of addon hardware to get PVR functionality out of the Xbox,

It is currently titled "HomeStation", and it's a completely new piece of hardware. It's been buzzed about for a few months now, and MS employees have been quoted actually using the term "HomeStation" in reference to the concept, although it has yet to be confirmed that it will actually be produced (this move is confirmation enough for me).

This is an interesting move for a few reasons. First, I think the actual impetus to make the final decision was the reception that the Moxi got at CES. Of course, the Moxi has yet to be sales tested, so it's an interesting situation. TiVO is confusing enough - over Christmas I heard many inane and downright incorrect descriptions of what TiVO (PVR = TiVO in most people's minds) is. And these were generally intelligent people in the 40s who can use a wordprocessor and a VCR without any problems.

The second side of things is the video game market. In America, consoles generally have to be absolutely identical. If the HomeStation adds more features, it's unlikely they will be programmed to. If it offers better graphics or anything like that, you're running into a seriously dangerous situation of having games play differently on different systems - which is something the console world does not have to deal with. The worst case would be a games with compatability problems. That spells the end of X-Box, IMO - Consoles are slick because you don't have to worry about such things.

That's not even beginning to bring up the problem if they actually *market* the thing with the name "HomeStation". Sony should sue them if they do. It *will* confuse the customers, who right now walk into GameStop and say "My son wants one of those Playcubes (or GameBox, or whatever)". A friend is an assistant manager, and he had a guy who was insistant that he wanted the Gamecube 2, not the first one. Adding new names to the mix, *especially* something like "HomeStation" competing with "PlayStation" is insane. Make the MS HomeStation incompletely compatable (forward and backward) with the X-Box, and you've esentially added a 4th console to the war.

--
Evan

So, when people ask you...

[jd]

...why they should go to Linux, rather than a supported system from a company that's guaranteed to be around for a long time, maybe you can now mention just a teeensy bit of difference between the company staying around and the product.

I find it disturbing that Microsoft essentially killed off not just a product line but an entire networking philosophy - that of using the TV essentially as a combined computer monitor & network device.

(Sure, the former has been done a lot, the past 30 years, but usually the networking has been seperate.)

Don't anyone believe for a second that Microsoft will actually open up the Intellectual Property, if there's no buyer, even though they'd get no other income from it. Don't believe any "UltimateTV" or "WebTV" blueprints will start appearing on OpenCores or any other open source hardware site. And don't believe that Microsoft gives a damn for its customers or for technology as a whole.

If they lose that market, then it's in their interests to kill the technology. Dead technology might haunt them, but it can't hurt them.

Re:M$ hall of fame

[gowen]

Home users do not care about stability

Yes they do (or rather, the ones I know do). They're as likely to blame themselves as the software for crashes, though (at lot of my family say things like "It said General Protection Fault, what did I do wrong?"

And, having spent half a day reconstructing my sister-in-law's dissertation from a floppy where Word had decided to trash it, I can guarantee that many home users care very much about stability (I've never heard such language from her, before or since).

Re:Not surprising...

[ImaLamer]

the funny thing... I had a 5+ paragraph written up to dispute this crazy claim. Where did it go? Data heaven with the rest of my opened documents.

I won't type it again. It was too good.

So read this:

What a normal computer person KNOWS about microsoft