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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.
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.
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With XBox in more living rooms them Tivo, this means that Microsoft has a huge platform to launch from if they extend UltimateTV to the XBox.
Despite their previous advantage over TiVo of being able to record 2 shows at once, Ultimate TV never made any headway in the market. It had the following problems from the start...
- It's Microsoft. Despite what they would tell you, I think there's a real stigma with having Microsoft's name attached to something at this point. Despite the reality, to the average Joe it means this thing is going to crash often and not work the way I want it to.
- It's DirecTV only. TiVo has a "standalone" box and that means ANYONE can have TiVo.
It probably doesn't mean anything to TiVo and/or ReplayTV anyway since Ultimate TV never really gave them any competition.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
that leaves TiVo and ReplayTV as the main standing competitors
What about the promising new addition to the playfield:
Moxi?
It appears to me rather that Microsoft is focusing on the product that they think will make money and more quickly give them an advantage for competing with TiVo. XBox has the components it needs to compete with TiVo: good graphics, hard drive, video in/out, and a remote interface to control it.
end of line
Doesn't this fit right into the vapourware called HomeStation?
XBox (or call it a cheap PC) has a small harddrive, DVD decoding hw, TV out, remote, dsl/cable, lan. Stuff it with a mpeg2 encoding chip, increase the hd to TiVo size, give it a bit more ram. Don't you get a TiVo+game+browsing+DVD all-in-one box? Plus MS is kind enough to subsidise a couple of hundred dollars for each box. I don't even have to think about getting a small PC case with mini-atx mobo and half-apg size vid card with video out for my living room! Regardless how I don't like MS, that could be one hell of a box that I might just buy it so that MS effectively subsidise me!
humps
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...
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.
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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.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
My wife convinced me to buy a UTV last year. In my experience it was the best home appliance we bought in recent memory, despite my concerns about its Microsoft leanings.
Allow me to throw out some personal observations.
- It's NEVER crashed. Ever. It's a bit slow to respond to some keys, as if it's waiting for some bitstreamed data off the satellite for the next guide page, but it's rock-stable. This is no surprise - after all, if you never install anything except Windows9x, your computer will never need rebooting. It's when you install all the other cruft that things get flaky. And you can't do that to a UTV.
- It's almost perfectly integrated with DirecTV. That's something that Tivo lacks, and most Tivo owners don't know they're missing. For example, it's a bitstream-pure capture from the satellite. The picture is perfect every time. All the guide information is captured with the program - click Info when you watch a recording, and you get all the title and description, no matter how much later you watch it. The expanded guide is terrific - title, actors, and plot summary for every movie and most serial shows. The complete integration also extends to the record features, so as you browse or search the guide, you just click the record button to capture the selected show - no matter when it is. No programming, just one click recording (hmmm... patent material there?)
- Dual stream capability means I can record or watch two shows at the same time (yes, watch two - see the next topic about picture-in-picture). In fact I can record two and watch a third off the hard drive.
- It has a built-in PIP tuner. For those of us who didn't spend the extra bucks for a PIP-capable TV years ago, it works around that by providing a minimal picture in picture. And both the main and mini shows get captured for instant rewind - up to half an hour - not just the main screen.
- It's completely changed our paradigm of TV watching. No commercials, ever - we watch slightly delayed and simply skip them. Instant replay on any sports play. By delaying a football game an hour, I can watch an entire quarter in 8 or 9 minutes - each play is about 35-40 seconds apart, so one "Skip" forward and I'm watching the next play instantly. Want to watch a program at the same time as something else? Just record it and watch it afterwards. In fact, record TWO things and watch a third off the hard disk. How about easy recording - see something you like in the guide, click the record button and it gets recorded for you, start to finish, no overlaps, no fuss. You can even click a second time to record every instance ad nauseum. It is so convenient and perfectly suited to how I would have preferred to watch TV in the first place that anything less is pure frustration. My wife and I find ourselves hunting for the "Rewind" button on the radio now, since we're so used to backing up 7 seconds if we miss something. In fact we've even turned to each other and laughed after both wishing we could rewind something the baby did, to watch it again.
- Integration with my VCR. The UTV includes an infrared LED on a wire that you position on the front of your VCR, and the UTV can command your VCR to power up, start recording, stop recording, and power down. So you can set the system up to tape directly to the VCR if you don't want to dump something to the hard disk.
Sorry if I sound like a UTV commercial, but this is no joking the first consumer appliance I've ever bought that not only lived up to its hype, it far exceeded it. So from where I sit, who cares if it has MS on the label.
Now, as to the "others": Sure it has some shortcomings. But those are essentially in features I don't use. Okay, it's not fast, but I can live with the slow remote response in some features. I logged on to WebTV exactly once. It's a pain in the neck typing in a URL using four cursor buttons on a remote. The download speed for a page is okay, but nothing to write home about. And the resolution on a TV screen is awful. So I could care less if WebTV goes away. It's also got email capability. Again, typing an email would be a royal pain, and reading on the screen would be frustrating. So who cares about TV email. Anyone who buys this thing for a web browser or email appliance will be disappointed. But I doubt that's why it's selling. It's because of the awesome DTV integration. So if WebTV rolls over and croaks, good riddance, as long as the UTV features live on.
Finally, it's not $499 anymore. I think the shelf price at WalMart is $199.
Finally, one question: Why is MS (or is it DTV) still pumping so many bucks into UTV advertising? Just yesterday during the NFL playoffs, I saw a couple UTV ads.
My advice: if you can have DTV and can afford an extra $10 per month (for the guide and record features), GET ONE while you can. And my take on this: MS is wisely losing the WebTV and email features, and focusing on the really cool digital video features. (I hope!)
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music