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...

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.

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.